Sweet Enough Already: sugar-free cookie dough

Years ago, I was doing extensive cookie-related research (trawling Google for the perfect recipe) and found a "women's forum" with the recipe that I would take for my own. I've never gone back to any other recipe and it broke my heart a little bit this last year and a half, avoiding the recipe that'd carried me through deadlines and lazy weekends without ever failing me.

I've made a few adapted versions with spelt and agave - throwing in cocoa powder as spelt has a distinctive flavour of its own in some settings (quite earthy and nutty). And then, a few weeks ago, I discovered white spelt flour* and everything changed. I'm using xylitol for this as it's pretty much freely exchangeable with sugar and doesn't affect the browning of the cookies or the dry:wet ingredient ratio. So my beloved old recipe is almost just as I remember it!

Ben and Jerry have a lot to answer for, and one of the things I'm holding them accountable for is my love of raw cookie dough - something that seems pointless when you're used to more traditional English biscuits but feels so right with a gooey, American style mixture. So I'm writing this as a dough recipe and giving you free rein to eat it however you like!

Ingredients:

• 130g xylitol
• 100g butter/margarine (I use soya spread)
• 150g flour
• 100g chocolate chips
• 1tbsp milk (dairy/soya/oat etc - avoid rice milk as most rice has a high GI)
• splash of vanilla essence

Method:

• If you're planning on baking them, preheat the oven to 200°C.
• Set the butter in a pan to melt slowly, as you don't want it to bubble or burn.
• With one eye on the pan, mix the xylitol and flour in a large bowl. Don't add the chocolate chips yet or the butter will melt them!
• Make a well and stir in the butter, milk and vanilla essence. The mixture cools fairly quickly so you can now add the chocolate chips.
• This dough is delicious raw! I usually bake a batch but help myself to lashings of mixture as I'm going along.
• Spoon tablespoonfuls of mixture onto a greased baking tray and bake for 15-20 minutes. They will brown slightly at the edges but remain soft until you've left them to cool, so have faith!
• Another great way to have them is frozen! For this, roll your spoonfuls into little balls on a tray or in a lunchbox, cover and pop in the freezer for a couple of hours (or longer). I use this technique to get the best bit of Ben & Jerry's... well, without the Ben & Jerry's.

*Unfortunately, I can't find much information on the GI value of white spelt. I worry it might not actually be much better than white wheat flour. I'll keep digging and if this turns out to be the case, I'll update this post to use half-and-half wholegrain spelt and white spelt to lower the GI. The xylitol as a sugar substitute helps a lot too!