Cherry Almond Thumbprint Cookies
These thumbprint cookies are famous for their jam-filled centers. A Christmas cookie exchange favorite for sure!
It’s Christmas cookie exchange time and have I got a classic one for you to bake and share – Cherry Almond Thumbprint Cookies.
After perusing numerous recipes for this delicate, slightly sweet cookie, I noticed that the ingredients called for were pretty consistent – butter, egg yolk, brown sugar, flour, vanilla extract, salt, nuts, and jam.
My goal when making any kind of cookie a bit healthier is to lower the saturated fat and calories. To achieve both of these goals in today’s thumbprint cookies, I zeroed in on the butter (major source of saturated fat) and the nuts (a big calorie contributor).
As I explained in my Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe post, I like using two ingredients in place of stick butter when making cookies – a butter and oil blend and reduced-fat cream cheese. A butter and oil blend is often called spreadable butter. As the name implies, it’s a mixture of butter and oil. Butter and oil blends usually contain about half the saturated fat as regular stick butter. Land O’ Lakes and Challenge are two popular brands of spreadable butter. The addition of reduced-fat cream cheese gives the cookie some structure and, tablespoon for tablespoon, reduced-fat cream cheese has less saturated fat and fewer calories than stick butter.
Most of the thumbprint cookie recipes I looked at used 3/4 cup finely chopped nuts to roll the cookies in before baking. While nuts supply a variety of beneficial nutrients like vitamin E, folate, magnesium, copper, and potassium along with healthy monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, and dietary fiber, they also provide a lot of calories. Rather than rolling the cookies in chopped nuts, I just sprinkled them on top of the baked cookies. Three tablespoons of slivered almonds were all that was needed in this recipe.
The butter replacement tweak along with using fewer nuts reduced the calories in today’s thumbprint cookies by 28 percent and saturated fat by 55 percent – pretty impressive. One thing to keep in mind, even with these adjustments a cookie is still a cookie. So, moderation matters.
To your health,
Darlene
CHERRY ALMOND THUMBPRINT COOKIES
Yield: 16 servings
Serving Size: 1 cookie
Prep: 15 minutes
Ready: 30 minutes
INGREDIENTS
Parchment paper or vegetable oil cooking spray
1/4 cup spreadable butter and oil blend (such as Challenge Spreadable Butter)
1/4 cup (2 ounces) reduced-fat cream cheese
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 large egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white whole-wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup cherry preserves
3 tablespoons slivered almonds, toasted
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or coat with cooking spray; set aside.
In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, cream together butter and oil blend, cream cheese, brown sugar, egg yolk, and almond extract.
In a separate bowl, combine all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, and salt. Add dry ingredients to creamed ingredients and mix until just combined.
To yield 16 cookies, fill a tablespoon measuring spoon with dough and level off. Remove dough from spoon, roll into a ball, and place on prepared baking sheet 2 inches apart. Using your thumb, gently press an indent in the center of each cookie. Bake 10 to 12 minutes, or until edges begin to brown slightly. Cool cookies on a wire rack. Once cooled, spoon cherry preserves into thumbprint indent and top each cookie with almonds.
Nutrition Information per Serving
108 Calories, 4 g Total fat, 2 g Saturated fat, 0 g Trans fat, 18 mg Cholesterol, 58 mg Sodium, 16 g Total carbohydrate, 1 g Dietary fiber, 10 g Total sugars, 3 g Added sugars, 2 g Protein, 0 mcg (0%) Vitamin D, 11 mg (0%) Calcium, 0 mg (0%) Iron, 15 mg (0%) Potassium
© 2022 RECIPES MADE HEALTHY BY DARLENE ZIMMERMAN, MS, RD LLC
