Satisfying Sweet Potato Crackers

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I've been on a cracker kick lately ‐ we've joined a playgroup/home school co‐op which has been loads of fun, but since it generally lasts a few hours, we usually need to bring along a few snacks.

Not a problem, except our little night owl has been burning the midnight oil lately (until literally after midnight), so I'm usually racing around on these mornings trying to wake her up and get her ready and don't have a bunch of time to worry about packing up food.

There are many great prepackaged snacks out there, but since I make pretty much everything I can from scratch (both for economical and health reasons), our house just doesn't have a lot of easy grab‐and‐go options lying around.

Enter the world of the cracker.  I started fiddling around with a recipe for graham crackers and got it to a less‐sugary point that I'm pleased with, but I still wanted to come up with something a bit more nutritious for Gv to be snacking on regularly.

She loves the chia crackers that I've been making lately, but because they're made entirely of seeds, they tend to produce a few more crumbs than I'd like for nibbling on while in someone else's house.

I racked my brain to come up with something packed with nutrients that would work well in a cracker (besides just substituting things like flax or hemp or wheat germ for some flour) and came up with an obvious choice:  sweet potatoes!

Among the world's healthiest foods, sweet potatoes are ranked number one in nutrition out of all the vegetables.  They're loaded with just about everything good that you should get but don't in your daily diet.

So here are those little tubers of gold, disguised as a tasty cracker.  They're great on their own, or as a dipper in things like hummus or yogurt (the combination Gv has discovered is her favorite).  
 

What You Need:

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder (see how to make your own here)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (depending on your heat preference ‐ Gv is good with the larger amount, but it definitely gives the crackers a bit of a kick)

3 Tablespoons butter

1 cup cooked sweet potatoes (if you pierce 2‐3 with a knife and throw them in your toaster oven for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees, you can slice them in half after they've cooled and just squeeze the pulp out of the skins)

Kosher salt

What You Do:

1.  Mix everything (except the Kosher salt) in a bowl and roll it out onto a lightly floured surface.  I like to use a silicone baking mat for these, so I just place the mat onto a large cutting board, roll the dough out and then slide everything ‐ mat and all ‐ onto a baking sheet.  This has become my secret trick for easy crackers.

2.  Sprinkle some Kosher salt over the top of the dough and lightly press it in (although sometimes I forget this step and they're just as good without the added salt).

3.  Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

4.  Peel the cracker sheet off the mat, flip it over, and bake for another 15 minutes.

5.  Break the cracker into pieces once it has cooled.  If you want prettier‐shaped crackers, then you might want to use a cookie cutter to cut out cute shapes or use a pizza wheel to form squares.  We honestly don't care that much about how our crackers look (plus, I'm lazy), so it's much easier to flip the whole cracker sheet over during the baking cycle than it would be to flip each cracker individually.  But I suppose if fancy cracker shapes brighten your day, it wouldn't be that big of a deal to flip each one.

Do you make your own snack food?  What types of crackers are your favorites?  Have you ever thought about creating a healthier version at home?  I'd love to hear - leave a comment or email me at lisahealy (at) outlook (dot) com.

Like this recipe?  Find it and other delicious kid-friendly treats in the book Yum! Deliciously Healthy Recipes for Kids that I co-authored!

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