Making skillet cookies is a deliciously fun mess

It's easy to make a traditional skillet cookie into a healthy treat, and you won't miss that extra cup of sugar -- I promise!

One of the treats that I wanted to make as Valentine’s Day gifts (but didn’t quite get to) were crispy skillet cookies. I thought it would be fun to get my hands dirty with the five-year-old and turn a sugary recipe into a healthy treat. I did both last night and lived to tell the tale, both about the fun we had rolling the cookies in the coconut and about how delicious the recipe turned out. I know I say this a lot, but you really wouldn’t even guess that these were healthy … honest.

But they are good on so many levels — tasty, sweetened naturally, flourless, which means wheat-free and gluten-free in this case, easily made 100% organic and did I mention tasty?

Let me just make a few notes for you. Since Keith brought me home an organic brown rice cereal that was lightly sweetened (but he did the shopping so I wasn’t going to nitpick!), I left the agave out at first. They were plenty sweet but a bit tricky to stick together. If I squeezed them tightly in my hand while the mixture was still good and warm, I was successful.

Toward the end, when the mixture began to cool, I needed to squirt on a little agave syrup to help them stick together. So my suggestion, and the way I altered the recipe, is to use the unsweetened puffs and add enough agave to make the mixture sticky. I’m thinking a couple of tablespoons would be more than plenty. You could also just add more dates and chop them very finely and make sure you heat the mixture very well to get them nice and gooey.

Crispy Skillet Cookies

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Ingredients:

1 cup chopped dates (or more to help cookies stick better)
3 tablespoons organic butter
1 egg, well beaten
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups organic rice puffs
3/4 cup sliced almonds
agave syrup to taste (try about 2 tablespoons)
1 cup flaked coconut

Mix dates, butter and egg in heavy skillet. Melt over low heat; cook for about 5 minutes on low heat, until bubbly. Remove from heat; add vanilla, agave, rice cereal and almonds. As soon as the mixture is cool enough to handle, roll (really squeeze) into small balls and roll in coconut.

I tried mixing it up a bit and rolled a couple in carob powder. Yeah, don’t do that, although I think cocoa powder would be heavenly!

UPDATE: I recently made these as above but added about 1/4 cup sunflower seed butter along with the agave — delicious!