Liz Bakes for You: 1990's Mrs. Field's Low Fat Chocolate Cookies
The first dessert I remember loving was chocolate chip cookies.
I would stand on a little step stool to reach the kitchen counter and my mom would guide 3-or-4-year-old me through the process of creaming of the butter, sugars, adding the vanilla and egg, etc. My love may have been won by chocolate chip cookies based solely on the fact that the dough is the SUPREME dessert and I was allowed to lick the beaters from the hand mixer once everything was mixed. I’m sure there’s someone in the world who would love to go back to 1994 and cancel my mom for feeding me raw cookie dough (and so much sugar) but god love her and the early 90’s for shaping me into the cookie-dough loving creature I am today.
It almost goes without saying that I was a greedy toddler and frequently tried to double-dip my beaters in the dough. My mom decided the best way to dissuade me from this habit was to tell me that “the cookies won’t bake right if you double dip”—the implication being spit + cookie dough = f*cked up cookies, the LAST thing I wanted. So I kept my (probably very grubby) baby hands out of the cookie dough. I’ve met some 3-year-olds recently and…yeah…keep those fingers out of my desserts.
I share this anecdote for two reasons the first being because it kept me from double-dipping until the age of FIFTEEN. Yes. Read that back. I had gotten asked on a date before it ever occurred to me that the spit-cookie thing might not be real. My mother, the evil genius, told such a good fib that it didn’t strike me until I was walking from 3rd period chemistry to 4th period AP Language class that a bit of double-dipping couldn’t chemically alter cookie dough. Well, the joke’s on you, Mom, for having such a gullible child because I’m 50% you.
The other reason I shared all that was to introduce you all to the cookbook that has been an integral part of my baking since I started forming memories: the Mrs Fields Best Ever Cookie Book! (that exclamation point is legit part of the title, which proves to be a theme of her cookbooks). The very first page of recipes contains the Blue-Ribbon Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe—the one I would have double-dipped if not bamboozled by my mother. And to this day, I have the cookbook on my shelf.
However, when Adam and I were packing up for our month away in Portland it didn’t occur to me to pack the Mrs. Fields Cookbook. It served me well in high school when I baked nearly every recipe in it but I hadn’t really given it much attention since. I’ve moved on to the Jacques Torres recipe for chocolate chip cookies. So off to Portland we went with Claire Saffitz Dessert Person, Eden Grinshpan’s Eat Out Loud, and my personal recipe keeper (along with a KitchenAid 5 qt stand mixer and a giant tub of kitchen tools plus camera equipment, and a cat and a dog…it was a full car).
It was fortuitous then that I would stumble upon a Mrs. Fields cookbook offshoot entitled I Love Chocolate! at a secondhand shop down the street from my Air Bnb in Oregon. It was effectively a compilation of all the chocolate recipes from the cookbook I left back in Orlando and I bought it to thumb through, like a less haunting diary of my youth. “Ah yes, the Mocha Mouse Cheesecake, one and the same as the cheesecake I made and ate entirely in one day between freshman and sophomore years of college while binge-watching Weeds. A Classic!”
Another repeat recipe between the sister cookbooks was one for Low Fat Chocolate Cookies—the recipe containing the least appetizing photo of a cookie ever taken—like i said, I tried almost every recipe in the book but the photo discouraged me from ever trying this one in my youth. But don’t take my word for it…
Then, in whatever weird way my brain functions, I became convinced these would be the perfect cookie to make for my shiny new YouTube series, in which I share what it’s like to bake with me in the kitchen. Welcome to my kitchen, where I will make for you cookies I’ve never wanted to eat! Very realistic...
It’s worth noting that the 90’s were an absolutely BONKERS time for many, many reasons. The podcast You’re Wrong About gets into those reasons in a few episodes including an interesting one on the D.A.R.E. program. But we’ll keep to food-talk here: Low-Fat and Fat-Free diets were all the rage. To this day, I have fond memories of absolutely demolishing boxes of SnackWells’s Fat Free Devil’s Food cookies whenever I was at my Grandma’s house. Idc how unfounded anti-fat diets were, those things slapped.
Truly it got so bad we started putting fake butter in spray bottles—0 calories per serving! I blame the trend for the creation of low-fat Feta which I accidentally bought once (the Publix brand feta is green for full fat and slightly lighter green for low fat -_-) and it ruined my Saag Paneer but with Feta recipe—it didn’t melt AT ALL.
I’m not getting on any high horses. I know weight, diet, exercise, and lifestyle are all personal and frequently weaponized against us as consumers to get us to buy things (yay…). But I think the low-fat trend is worth refuting a bit before I ironically dive into a low-fat recipe. I’ll point you this article from the NCBI (under the NIH) for information on how foods made to be lower in fat can contain higher level of sugar (I love sugar but I don’t like it snuck into my food). And I’m including the abstract from How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America by Ann F La Berge published in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences because, to be fair to the entire country, we sort of planted this low-fat idea a super long time ago:
Abstract
This article examines how faith in science led physicians and patients to embrace the low-fat diet for heart disease prevention and weight loss. Scientific studies dating from the late 1940s showed a correlation between high-fat diets and high-cholesterol levels, suggesting that a low-fat diet might prevent heart disease in high-risk patients. By the 1960s, the low-fat diet began to be touted not just for high-risk heart patients, but as good for the whole nation. After 1980, the low-fat approach became an overarching ideology, promoted by physicians, the federal government, the food industry, and the popular health media. Many Americans subscribed to the ideology of low fat, even though there was no clear evidence that it prevented heart disease or promoted weight loss. Ironically, in the same decades that the low-fat approach assumed ideological status, Americans in the aggregate were getting fatter, leading to what many called an obesity epidemic. Nevertheless, the low-fat ideology had such a hold on Americans that skeptics were dismissed. Only recently has evidence of a paradigm shift begun to surface, first with the challenge of the low-carbohydrate diet and then, with a more moderate approach, reflecting recent scientific knowledge about fats.
And if it’s not clear by all of that: I don’t think you should make these cookies. I say as much in the YouTube video as well. I made the video to entertain and I really hope you watch. Perhaps you recently invested in a brand new bucket hat and butterfly clips and you’re able to fully immerse yourself in the 90’s nostalgia while you watch!
Low-Fat Chocolate Cookies — from I Love Chocolate! By Debbi Fields
Yield: 5 1/2 dozen (yes, INSANE)
You’ll need:
bowl
hand mixer or spatula
spatulas
plastic wrap
desire to eat bad cookies
Ingredients:
2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
3 egg whites (yes, it’s 1994, hold the yolks, pls)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup mini semisweet chocolate chips
Method:
In a medium bowl, combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.
In another medium bowl with a hand mixer, combine the dark brown sugar and granulated sugar. Slowly beat in the oil (it doesn’t have to be slow…). Beat in the applesauce, egg whites, and vanilla. Blend on low speed until smooth.
Add the flour mixture and blend on low speed until the dough is just combined. Refrigerate the dough until firm, about 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 300 degrees F
Roll the dough into small 1-inch balls, place on a cookie sheet pan and flatten slightly. Sprinkle with the mini chocolate chips, then bake for 17-19 minutes (do not overbake; when the cookies cool they will get hard). Transfer the cookies to wire racks to cool.
Resources:
I don’t think I have much to add this week expect that I’m not sure I feel GREAT about all the styles from 1999 coming back into fashion.