Chef Laura Lea is a Certified Holistic Chef and food writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her company, LL Balanced, provides you with easy, nutritious and family-friendly recipes that will make healthy eating a pleasure and restore balance to your life!
You can learn more about Chef Laura Lea and LL Balanced here. You can also purchase a copy of her cookbook, The Laura Lea Balanced Cookbook, here which contains 120+ delicious and healthy recipes!
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A BLOG AND RECIPE FOR STUFFED PEPPER SOUP BY OUR FRIEND AND CONTRIBUTOR, CHEF LAURA LEA WITH LAURA LEA BALANCED.
I recently sang the praises of Christie Cookies in my Gooey Fudgy Rocky Road Cookies recipe. I wrote about how they were an epic and irreplaceable part of my childhood, and how they still have some of my all-time favorite cookies.
So you can imagine that I just about jumped out of my skin when Christie Cookies reached out to me to collaborate! They saw my IG stories raving about their Rocky Road cookie and how it inspired my recipe, and they asked if I’d be interested in creating an Autumn cookie for them.
Ummm….where do I sign up?!
Lovely Brooke, the Content & Community Coordinator for Christie Cookies, was interested in offering a healthier option for their consumers, and I was 100% in to help in any way. To make sure I didn’t overlap with any of their other flavors, an Apple Cinnamon Butterscotch Cookie sounded like a great fit.
Now, I could certainly have made a cookie with almond flour and sugar-free chocolate chips etc, like a lot of my baked goods, but I wanted to 1) make the recipe sustainable and affordable for Christie Cookies and 2) make a cookie that would appeal to those who are use to traditional baked goods.
For an LL Balanced spin, I used monkfruit sweetener, which is totally sugar-free and zero-calorie/glycemic and coconut sugar, which is low glycemic and contains some nice micronutrients.
While the in-store version of this cookie uses regular AP flour, I chose AP einkorn flour, which I have been using quite a bit lately. This study found that einkorn flour may provide cardiovascular benefits [and] reduce inflammation and thus the risk of inflammation-related diseases such as irritable bowel disease. In addition, some people with gluten-sensitivity find they can tolerate einkorn better than regular AP flour (but check with your doctor first!).
It took me a good TWELVE rounds to perfect this cookie and make it worthy of the Christie Cookies display case, but here we are! These Apple Cinnamon Butterscotch cookies taste indulgent and give you aaaalll the Fall feels. They have nice crispy edges with a soft, chewy center, and they make for incredible ice cream sandwiches with some high-quality vanilla ice cream (just sayin).
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