Pack these sweet potatoes into kids' lunches

Sweet Potato Cookies Get Top Marks for “Delicious!”

Your eyes are not deceiving you. You are indeed looking once again at sweet potatoes! I mashed them up with some prune butter and a little maple syrup. Then I made a cookie dough by adding oatmeal, whole-grain flour, and ground sun-flower seeds. 

These naturally sweet cookies are packed with nutrition for you and your family. I adapted the recipe from one I found on Julia Di Paolo’s excellent site.

I’m not usually impressed with cookies, in general. When it comes to sweets, I prefer a delicious fruity concoction of some sort for special occasions, with lots of decadent cream.

But as a way to get vegetables into the lunch boxes of picky eaters, these are spectacular!

I made this batch with prune butter.

Make magic with prunes

I hear you. You hate prunes. But just wait… my prune butter is made only from plump, dried pitted prunes—not those yucky soggy brown blobs at summer camp that come floating in sickly sweet syrup.

You just whir up the dried prunes with a little warm water until they look like thick chocolate sauce. I put mine through a food mill to strain out bits of skin. All you’re left with is a rich syrup that tastes like fresh fruit.

The Internet gurus say you can replace half the fat in a dessert recipe with prune butter, especially if you are using chocolate. But guess what. Although I measured out 2 tablespoons of coconut oil like Julia told me to, I completely forgot to add it in. My counter was so cluttered up with various machines and spoons and bowls and jars and measurers that the oil got lost in the confusion. It was all very un-Vinny-like.

The good news is the cookies tasted delicious… even without the fat!

But because the nutrients in sweet potatoes are absorbed better on the backs of a few fat molecules, I left 1 tablespoon of coconut oil in the recipe—just to be on the safe side…

I know—you can’t just go buy prune butter at the health food store. You have to make it yourself. But it keeps well in the freezer. And surprise! It doesn’t freeze hard. So you can take it straight out from the cold and work with it immediately. I make up lots while I’m at it and package it in 1/4-cup batches in little freezer bags for next time. But if I haven’t convinced you to try this wonder food, don’t give up on these cookies. Use apple sauce instead.

The rest of the assembly was a snap. One sweet potato makes 30 cookies about 2 inches across. You can eat three of them for about 100 calories. I calculated the nutrients, below, so you can see for yourself. No sugar spikes with these babies! Here’s how to proceed.

Doh! Don’t forget the oil, like I did

Dry Ingredients

• ½ cup rolled oats
• ½ cup whole-grain flour
• ½ cup ground sunflower seeds
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon powder

Wet ingredients

• 1 tablespoon coconut oil or butter, melted
• ¼ cup prune butter or apple butter made by pureeing the fruit with a little hot water until mushy
• ¾ cup cooked and mashed sweet potato (1 medium sweet potato)
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup

Directions

1. Prepare your ingredients. The pureeing and grinding take a little time.
2. Grease two baking sheets and set oven to 300°F.
3. Mix all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl.
4. Mix all the wet ingredients in a small bowl.
5. Pour the wet ingredients into the centre of the dry ones and quickly mix to combine.
6. Drop large teaspoons of dough onto baking sheets.
7. Decorate each cookie with a chocolate chip if you like.
8. Bake at 300°F for 25-30 minutes.

My batch made 30 cookies. Nutrition in each cookie: 38 calories, 1 g fat, 80 mg sodium, 6.5 g carbohydrate of which 2 g are sugar and 1 g is fiber. 1 g protein, 38 RAE vitamin A, 0.8 mg vitamin C, 40 mg calcium, 0.3 mg iron, 0.3 mg vitamin E, 0.5 NE niacin, 3.7 DEF folate.

Related links

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