I love cookies … and cookie dough.  Which is better, I wonder?  Anyway, I was in a baking mode last week and decided to make some oatmeal raisin cookies … as you do!

I received one of my regular e-mails with a recipe for ‘healthy’ oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and thought it was my duty to try them out.  And as I was mixing up the dough (and taste-testing along the way, you know you have to do this!), I made a number of adjustments.  And then I thought it would be fun to see if people could tell the difference between ‘healthy’ oatmeal raisin cookies i.e. no refined sugar and those with refined sugar.  So I whipped up a batch of Sally’s peanut butter oatmeal cookies (recipe adapted from her Flourless Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies – see here).  Oh yeah, the no-refined sugar ones also had peanut butter in them, so they were basically the same but different proportions, and obviously different sweeteners.

I took the two types of cookies to two meetings at work … and got people to vote.

I also wanted to know whether people liked the one with no-refined sugar (or the one they thought had no-refined sugar) better than the other one.  You can see I only made small cookies, so there was no excuse for people not to try both.

And the results were …

In the vote for the cookie with no-refined sugar, 55% of people got it correct.  Which meant that it was pretty evenly split between the two.  Which means, it wasn’t that easy to tell the difference.  Interesting …

In the vote for which they preferred – 55% of people voted for the one with no-refined sugar.  Which meant that healthy can mean tasty!

I found these results really interesting that people couldn’t tell the difference and didn’t really prefer one over the other!

I’m still working on tweaking the recipe for the no-refined sugar one and I’ll post that when I get the chance.  Let me know what you think – any suggestions are always welcome!

Until next time, enjoy cooking at home!

Sarah