Bethenny Bakes
www.bethennybakes.com

Once upon a time, it was hard to eat healthy and not be considered a freak. "Your food smells" are words that I heard at least twice a week when I would eat my good-for-you lunches beside unforgiving elementary school classmates. Times have somewhat changed: Eating well has become an accepted way to live, and a greater variety of healthy products have made it possible to do so without attracting too much unwanted attention.

"I get a lot of emails from moms with kids who have food intolerances," reports Bethenny Frankel, owner of Manhattan-based healthy cookie company Bethenny Bakes, over an iced tea at her neighborhood vegan joint, the Candle Café. "The kids look at the cookie and they love it. The other kids don’t look at them and see that they have the sad little healthy treat."

No dairy. No eggs. No wheat. Low fat. Inside their clear plastic packets, these individually wrapped, saucer-sized snacks are pretty much dead ringers for their fat- and sugar-laden counterparts. But how good can a cookie lacking in all of those ingredients be?

Surprisingly, pretty good. While there is no substitute for fat, these biscuits satisfy the sugar craving, and though their staple ingredients are oat flour, applesauce, banana and evaporated cane juice, they manage to avoid that "healthy" flavor that ruins many other natural treats. (That "healthy" flavor, known widely from a query such as, "Does it taste good, or does it taste healthy?" is likely due to the barley and rice flours or the brown rice syrup, all of which figures prominently in many mass-produced, naturally baked goods.)

Frankel’s chocolate chip cookies are astoundingly chewy, and though the peanut butter chocolate chip ones can’t seem to hold themselves together, they make up for it in stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth denseness; the latter are also the most filling. Frankel’s favorite is the fudge chocolate chip, whose deep, dark hue and prodigious use of cocoa allows you to suspend your disbelief and pretend that you are, in fact, eating something that is bad for you.

The upside to the fat and sugar tradeoff is the aftereffects, or lack thereof. Because the cookies are made of whole (i.e. unrefined) ingredients, one is less likely to crash and burn after a brief-lived sugar high.

Still, there are some cheap thrills to be found in Frankel’s cookies. A nice caricature of the entrepreneur herself–lean-legged and busty with long brown hair, a short-short skirt and a toothy smile–adorns her label. The real Bethenny Frankel is not quite as buxom as her illustrated self and blushes when told that’s she’s actually much prettier in person.

"It’s not like I’m fat," she demurs, running her fingers through her hair. "I want people to know that I’m a thin girl who eats these cookies every day."