I’ve been trying to make healthier recipe alternatives for a lot of my favorite recipes. This weekend, I tried making a healthier version of my favorite pumpkin chocolate chip cookies by eliminating the egg and oil and replacing them with nonfat plain Greek strained yogurt.

The cookie surface wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked and had quite a few little bumps. Texture-wise, the cookies were a bit chewier than the original version. Actually it was more like a pumpkin bread texture. This isn’t one of those recipes where I found the healthier version to be the same or even better than the original. But these didn’t suck either.

I used calorie counter to calculate the nutritional value.

Original recipe:                                                    Healthier version:

So the healthier recipe is 32 calories and 4.7 grams of fat lighter per cookie.

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Healthier Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yield: 12

Ingredients:

1/2 cup canned pumpkin puree
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup minus 1 tbsp nonfat Greek strained plain yogurt
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F and line baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. Whisk together pumpkin, sugar, vanilla and yogurt in a large bowl . In a separate bowl, whisk together together flour, baking powder, baking soda, ground cinnamon, and salt. Add the flour mixture to pumpkin mixture and stir until combined. Dough will be wet and sticky.

3. Stir in the chocolate chips.

4. Take 2 tablespoon full of dough and drop onto cookie sheet, about 2 inches apart. Repeat with remaining dough. When finished, try to shape the dough to resemble a cookie. It will be hard to do since the dough is so wet and sticky. The cookies dough should be round and flat and smooth, resembling close to the finished baked product because the cookies don't spread much during baking and will rise up. It helps to work with the dough if your hands are freshly washed and slightly damp.

5. Bake for approximately 10 minutes or until lightly brown.