Cooking With My Kids/My Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

I've said before how much I love cooking with my kids. The first thing you need when cooking with toddlers is the gear. They love an apron and a chef's hat. They gotta look the part! The second thing you need is a "safe cutter knife" (can get cheap from Pampered Chef). Trust me, they can't hurt themselves on this knife! In this picture, Hailey is trying to split a macadamia nut in half. She wasn't successful, but it sure kept her busy.

I'm carefully monitoring Hailey as the butter is melted on very low heat. She enjoys "stirring" it around. We don't have a microwave, so I bought this adorable little cast iron pan that I use just for melting butter or coconut oil. Isn't it cute?

Cooking is such a great homeschooling activity. Josiah is learning his fractions simply by cooking with me. Now that he is actually able to use a small knife, he is getting to be a great help. When I use the food processor or my KitchenAid , the kids fight over who is going to help me. They love it!

Here are the yummy white chocolate macadamia nut cookies the kids helped me make. The thing I absolutely love about this cookie recipe is that it is so versatile. I use this same recipe to make regular chocolate chip cookies and well other types. This recipe makes a lot (48 cookies), so I like to freeze half the dough and only make two sheets of cookies at a time. By the next day, the whole wheat flour tends to make the cookies crumble easily, so you want to eat them fairly quickly. Trust me, this won't be a problem!

Jackie's Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies:
1 cup honey
1 cup sucanat
1 cup butter or coconut oil (softened)
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
4 1/4 whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips (use organic if possible - don't want anything hydrogenated and if you can get them made with unrefined sugar, even better!)
1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix together honey, sucanat, butter or coconut oil, eggs and vanilla. If you are using a mixer, add flour, baking soda, salt, chocolate chips and nuts. When well mixed, drop dough onto sheet (I love using stoneware) and cook 10 to 12 minutes. However, I like to bake two stoneware bar pans at a time. If you are going to do this, place both room temperature stoneware on middle rack and only cook for 9 minutes if you like soft cookies. You may need to adjust flour and length of cooking time depending on if you like a soft or crispy cookie. Enjoy!