Picky Kid- homemade crackers, part two

I was so excited by my successful batch of crackers earlier, and all the new things I learned that I decided to also try the graham crackers again. So good!

So I shared in my earlier post that I loved this recipe for graham crackers. I have actually had some poor results with one or two other recipes, but that is probably more because I messed them up trying to make them low sugar and lower in fat. Each of those attempts failed horribly. I really think trying to get them so low in sugar was the problem.

With this attempt I didn't lower them much at all. Why? I've been making so much from scratch that we've pretty much eliminated all home-based refined sugars and excess fat. Not that my girls never eat a cookie at school (I swear, it's like they have birthdays every week with cupcakes and things), but on a day to day basis there is very little added sugar at all. What we do use is much less refined than standard white sugar. On a daily basis we tend to use honey (now local honey, www.madebybees.com, and another brand available at Power Road Farmers Market), coconut palm sugar, agave nectar, and turbinado sugar. We don't use all of them everyday though, they all work well in different things. I like coconut palm sugar especially in place of brown sugar. I do still have brown sugar and cane sugar too, but I use them very little.



Anyhow, back to the crackers. I'm going to share her ingredients list, just to comment on my measurements. Follow the link above for her method and additional information.

INGREDIENTS:

1½ cups all-purpose flour
1 & 1/3 cups graham flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons honey

Okay, so I used 1/2 cup of butter (one stick), 1/4 cup of coconut oil and 1/4 cup of applesauce. This was as much as I was willing to 'sub' out for fat because other attempts to go lower did not work. I replaced all the dark brown sugar with coconut palm sugar and used local orange blossom honey. I rolled them out directly on my counter top. 

I also cut them more like individual squares you might see in a sheet of graham crackers bought at the store. I wanted them to sort of look like them (so they'd appeal a little more to little A), but obviously these have none of the extra preservatives and whatnot. 

In my oven, I used the convection setting. I highly recommend using it if your oven has one. 

(are you wowed by my photography skills?)

This recipe made 75 of these rectangles. Two rectangles have roughly 67 calories, 3 grams of fat, and 5 grams of sugar. Now if you compare it to a popular brand of graham crackers, two of their boring rectangles contain 33 calories and 1 gram of fat and 2 grams of sugar. However, when you add in that these homemade versions don't have the added ingredients of the storebought brand 

Ingredients: UNBLEACHED ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE {VITAMIN B1}, RIBOFLAVIN {VITAMIN B2}, FOLIC ACID), GRAHAM FLOUR (WHOLE GRAIN WHEAT FLOUR), SUGAR, SOYBEAN OIL AND/OR PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED COTTONSEED OIL, HONEY, LEAVENING (BAKING SODA AND/OR CALCIUM PHOSPHATE), SALT, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SOY LECITHIN, CORNSTARCH. CONTAINS: WHEAT, SOY.

I definitely chose the homemade ones. 

Hey, just sayin...

(I linked back to Nabisco, which is where I found the list for their graham cracker brand).