Half sugar cookies.

[Juke_spin]

Yesterday I made chocolate-chip & nut cookies for the second time using stevia in place of refined white sugar. The cookies are a resounding sucess - and I've managed to stay on my diet.

I used a recipe from the back of the semi-sweet choc. chips package which calls for 3/4 C of brown sugar and 3/4 C of granulated sugar. In place of the granulated sugar I used 3/4 Teasp. of stevia white powder. The recipe calls for a cup of walnuts along with the package of chocolate-chips but I substituted chopped Brazil nuts and used over a cup and a half.

As I hate portioning the batter onto a baking sheet most of the whole process, I do just one sheet at a time and freeze the remaining batter. Today I thawed the frozen batter until I could cut a thick sheet of it from the round it had frozen into, then cut squares and rectangles to make a sheet full of big, thick cookies.

In spite of my heavy cookie intake I've managed to lose between one and one and a half inches from my waist since going on a diet about ten days ago. Coffee helps.

[dan_nc]

Steve--I've never heard of stevia before. Just googled and and saw a bunch of places are selling it. What's been your experience with the product?

[Thusa]

is stevia related to splenda? my grandparents are bigs fans of it, since my grandpa cant eat sugar anymore.

theres got to be some odd ingredients in this non-sugar substitute in order to make it taste like it does. it kind of worries me. my grandpa always tells me how even though it doesnt have any sugar, it probably causes some odd cancer because anything that works that well has to have some kind of downside.

it might be that its expensive as all get out too, or at least thats what i heard.

[Juke_spin]

Dan and Thusa, stevia, the herb, and steviacide, its white powdery extract, are natural* foods. The natives of Central and parts of South America have been using the unrefined herb to sweeten drinks and foods for centuries, possibly millenia. Before she disapeared, Roshni left us this:

http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/showthread.php?t=69011

My own experiance with stevia extract began about ten years ago when I'd frist gotten into PCs and the Internet and learned of its existence. It was much harder to find in bulk back then and considerably more expensive than now, but I elected to invest $72.00 per pound in it to eliminate the granulated, highly refined sugar I'd been using up until then to sweeten my coffee, which I've always drank 'light and sweet', and other beverages. I confess that the cookie making mentioned in the post above was the first times I used stevia powder in baking. On the other hand, I only rarely made cookies although I may be making them more frequently in the future. Also, it's unlikely that one could replace all the sugar from a cookie recipe without impacting the texture in a negative way.

I've used steviacide in my coffee and other drinks as well as my hot and cold cereals for the last decade and, considering that it's three hundred times as sweet as refined sugar, have avoided all those hundreds of pounds of sugar by the switch. I've come to like the taste over that of sugar in all but a few foods and I have much less craving for sweetness in what I eat and drink than I used to.

It's available in bulk through the Internet for about twenty to twenty-five bucks a pound.

http://www.herbalcom.com/store.php3?...c030a7e73e0c76

*The white powder extract is a refinement of the natural plant.