Cut the Calories with Monkfruit Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love chocolate and most things made with chocolate but that can be a calorie heavy passion. What if you could cut the calories from sugar without affecting the flavor and texture of your chocolate chip cookies? Let's see if Lakanto's monkfruit sweeteners can give us great cookies and let us enjoy them with less calories and sugars. We have both their Classical variety that is a 1-to-1 exchange for cane sugar and their Golden variety that is a 1-to-1 exchange for brown sugar. Since the ratio of exchange is direct, I used the same recipe with cane sugar and light brown sugar for a comparison in terms of making, baking, and eating. I was sent both the Classic and the Golden sweeteners, Maple Flavored syrup, and some lovely freebies from Lakanto via the Tryazon program in exchange or hosting a party and sharing my evaluations of their products with guests and all of you on social media; no other form of compensation was received for my honest sharing about my experiences.

Making Reveal:

I used the recipe that came with the sweeteners. I used the exact same ingredients, tools, equipment, oven, and made them one batch after the other. As far as I could control, every except the types of sweeteners used were identical.

The Lakanto sweeteners produced a stiffer and dryer cookie dough than when I used cane and brown sugars. However the dough was not too dry nor stiff if I switched out my paddle attachment to mix in the baking chips. In neither case was the dough so sticking that I needed to add in any extra flour.

Baking Reveal:

The time that worked best for my oven on the day (yesterday) that I baked these was 11 minutes per batch. This allowed me time to remove the cookies to parchment paper on my dining room table and to get another baking sheet ready to go into the oven as soon as the timer beeped.

Lakanto vs Cane Sugars Cookie Tops

The Lakanto cookies puffed up more and didn't really spread out but the cane and brown sugar cookies remained flat and did spread out a bit while maintaining their shape. The amount of browning looks to be slightly darker on the bottom of the cookies, don't you think?

Lakanto vs Cane Sugars Cookies Browned Bottoms

Eating Reveal:

Seven Brave Taste Testers

I had six friends show up to help me do the taste testing but I tasted each cookie before they arrived just to make sure the results were good enough to serve. The Lakanto version is crispy on the outside and crunches with almost every bite, the sweetness is a bit intense for me. I cleaned my mouth out with water and waited for 10 minutes before trying the other cookie. The cane sugars version is a crunchier cookie because it spread out more and it doesn't taste as sweet so the butter flavor comes out more intensely. FYI, I am not a crunchy cookie lover, I prefer softer and chewier cookies personally.

I had my guests follow the same procedure for trying the cookies out themselves with a water cleanse and waiting between tasting. Their opinions were split. One preferred the texture of the Lakanto cookies, two liked the taste as well as the cookie made with cane sugars, three of us didn't like either the texture or the flavor as well as the standard cookies. No one was a big fan of crispy cookies. Maybe I should have used my regular oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe?

Calorie Differences: 

The Monkfruit Chocolate Chip Cookies had 95.1 calories per cookie

The cane and brown sugar Chocolate Chip Cookies had 115.6 calories per cookie

A difference of 20.5 calories per cookie!

Even knowing that the calorie difference was this much, only one person would eat Lakanto sweetener cookie given the choice. The rest of us wouldn't turn the Lakanto cookie away but we also wouldn't make it or go out of my way to get one.

What about that Maple Flavored Syrup?

I started off our party with two whole wheat waffles and two little bowls of syrup -- one the Lakanto and one an organic maple syrup from my favorite grocery store. I asked guests to use different forks to cut off a piece of waffle and dip it in the syrups to do a taste test. We noticed that the Lakanto was thinner and sweetener though the two of us who regularly use lower calories syrups thought it fine.

Overall Opinions

For diabetics, this could answer a real need and we all agreed that people who live with that disease should given the Lakanto products a try. However, I recommend that instead of a 1 to 1 substitution it might be better to do a 0.75 to 1 ratio with less of the Lakanto. The sweetener also has an aftertaste that every tester picked up on though we had different evaluations of how intense that lingering flavor was.

Here's the big problem: This product was presented to me as natural and made from monkfruit. One of my testers who came is a dear friend of mind and struggles with very bad reactions to a wide range of sweeteners. I share the company information and from her research and mine, we thought she could have these cookies and syrup. However when the products arrived I found that the very first ingredient is Erythritol which she cannot consume. Why put Erythritol in this at all? We tried to figure that out. Some of us have had monkfruit and it has a distinctive taste that some people do not like so is the artificial sweetener an attempt to counter that? If so, why not be upfront with that in the documentation instead of just having it on the product label.

This was very disappointing and I cannot recommend Lakanto because of this fact.