Delicious (and Healthy) Holiday Treats

The holidays are almost here—as are the platters heaped with cookies and the tins packed with fruit cakes and pumpkin bread. Soon everywhere we turn—at family gatherings, office parties and school events—we will be surrounded with trays of sugary treats.

Avoiding all that decadence is nearly impossible (and isn't any fun either) but you can have your cake and eat it too—just step into the kitchen and bake your own healthier (but still delicious) versions of traditional baked goods. In her new book, The Healthy Hedonist (Simon & Schuster, 2005, $19.95), Myra Kornfeld has created recipes that make use of whole-grain flours, more nutritious sweeteners and healthier fats to create tasty treats that will please any palate.

While substituting healthier ingredients can improve the nutritional value and often flavor of baked goods, you will also see some differences in the way those ingredients behave. Toss a few extra carrots into a soup or leave out a cup of stock and it doesn't really matter. But if you try to use melted butter in place of solid butter when making cookies, you can end up with an unexpected result.

Let's start with flour. Wheat flour has historically been the most commonly used type—but isn't necessarily the best flour for quick breads. In yeast breads, no other flour matches wheat's ability to form the strong stretchy bands of gluten that allow yeast doughs to rise into beautiful loaves of bread. Gluten is also responsible for the chewy texture prized in yeast breads. Quick breads, cakes and cookies on the other hand are prized for their tenderness, so a baker must fight against the development of gluten when using wheat flour.

Adding extra sugar or butter inhibits the development of gluten, as does shortening mixing time, but the most common method is to utilize all-purpose or cake flour, both of which have a lower protein (gluten) content than bread flour. Unfortunately, most all-purpose and cake flours have also been refined to remove the bran and germ (read as: remove the fiber, minerals and vitamins). The result is a wonderfully tender cake that offers nothing but the empty calories of white flour.