These cookies are delicious. Seriously, what’s not to love about weighty disks of spiced cookies, piled high with golden grains of raw sugar, and baked till fragrant and chewy? Baking these cookies is also a great way to experiment with tuning into to your body, and letting it guide you to what will best nourish you on any given day. Yup, we’re talking intuitive eating here folks, a subject dear to my heart and something I’ve been practising in my own life for a number of years. If you’re not familiar with intuitive eating, you can read about my views on it here and here, and you can put it into practice by making this very recipe!.

Watch me show you how in my recipe video, or just head straight to your spice cabinet and let your sense of smell be your guide. If the spice smells good to you, in it goes. If not, leave it out. It’s that simple. Please don’t feel the need to restrict yourself to the list of spices I’ve given you below – I’d be delighted if you were to improve this recipe with your own variations :)

Brown sugar and spice cookies

Makes around 18-20 large cookies.

Ingredients

250 grams plain flour
1.5 teaspoons cornflour
1 teaspoon baking soda
250g brown sugar
170 grams butter, melted (I use salted butter)
1 egg (preferably from a pasture-raised chicken)
Around ½ to 1 cup raw sugar

Plus your choice of spices
Choose from the following suggestions or even better, freestyle it according to where your body guides you on baking day! This goes for quantities too, if you want to add more or less then please, be my guest.

1t cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cardamom
¼ teaspoon cloves

Directions

Melt your butter and set aside (I do mine in a saucepan on the stove).
Place the flour, cornflour and baking soda in a bowl. Add the spices from the above list – you can either follow the list, or even better have some fun smelling the different spices and deciding for yourself what and how much of each you’d like in your cookies today.
Give all the dry ingredients a quick mix – I like to do this with my bare hands. We transfer energy from our hands into food as we work with it, so I like to ditch my wooden spoon where possible and use my hands. Also, flour feels REALLY nice on your hands! Way nicer than you’d think. Try it :)
Add the brown sugar to your melted butter (I just throw this straight into the saucepan I have melted the butter in), and give it a good stir with a wooden spoon for a couple of minutes. Try to be in the moment as you do this – take the opportunity to bring your attention to what you’re doing right now, the slow stirring actions you’re making in the bowl. Think of it as a mini kitchen meditation.
Once your sugar and butter are well combined, add the egg and stir again until combined. Finally, tip in your dry ingredients and give them a good mix through too. This will give you a reasonably stiff batter.
Refrigerate your batter for at least 30 minutes. It helps the cookies keep some shape in the oven – this mixture spreads out a lot, which gives you lovely giant cookies, but refrigerating the batter will keep the spread from getting too crazy!
While your batter is chilling, preheat the oven to 160C and grease two baking trays. Shape two tablespoon-lots of batter into rough balls and place on your baking tray. Leave a good 10cm in between each cookie to allow for a lot of spread. Press down lightly on the top of your ball shape to flatten it a little. Repeat until you’ve used all the dough. Of course, you can make your cookies any size you like but I find the two tablespoon size gives me enough cookie area for a very liberal piling of raw sugar.
Pile the aforementioned raw sugar onto your cookies. And I do mean pile, this is not a time for delicate sprinkling. YDon’t worry about spilling the sugar on the baking tray either. It won’t burn, it’ll just cleverly incorporate itself into the bottom of your cookies.
Pop the cookies into the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. At the ten minute mark, pull your cookies out and pile more raw sugar onto their middles. They will have spread by then, so there will be vacant sugar real estate that must be filled! Check your cookies at the 15 minute mark. You want them still a little bit undercooked in the middle when you take them out – you should still be able to easily indent one with your finger when you give it a light press. This means they’ll retain a slightly chewy centre.
Once you’re satisfied, pull them out and let them cool on their trays for five minutes, then gently slide a spatula under them to loosen. This step is very important, these cookies have very high tray-sticking potential, so make sure you give them the spatula treatment.
Once you’ve wiggled them around with the spatula you can transfer to wire racks to cool, or just leave them cooling on their trays.
Devour at will.