In this episode of “Eat with Intention TV”, Cassandra Bodzak shares her easy, healthy vegan, gluten free sugar cookies for the perfect holiday treat. This recipe features Bob’s Red Mill gluten free baking flour as well as date sugar to make it gluten free and cut the overly processed sugar with a more nutrient dense date alternative.
**This post has been sponsored by Bob’s Red Mill who I am thrilled to partner with as they are my favorite brand when it comes to healthy, gluten free baking ingredients!**
Healthy Holiday Cookies
3/4 cup of vegan butter (I used soy free Organic Earth Balance)
3/4 cup of sugar (I split it up — 1/2 cup Bob’s Red Milldate sugar + 1/4 cup regular cane sugar – both organic)
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line a baking sheet pan with parchment paper. Combine your flaxseed meal and water in a small container and set a side to solidify. In a food processor or stand mixer, combine your sugars of choice with your soft vegan butter until both are thoroughly creamed. In a separate bowl, combine your dry ingredients (flour + baking powder) and slowly start adding them to your sugar/butter mixture. Once they are fully added, toss in your flax egg as well as your vanilla and almond extract. When everything is fully combined the dough should be thick but not crumbly, if it’s too dry add a couple tbsp of water till it combines well. Place your dough in the center of your parchment paper and another piece of parchment paper on top of it. Use a rolling pin (or your hands if you don’t have one) to flatten out the dough on your baking sheet (sandwiched between two parchment papers) and stick it in the fridge for 20 minutes to cool.
After 20 minutes, move your parchment papered dough on to the table and put a fresh piece on the baking sheet for your cookie cutter-ified treats. Take your cookie cutter and get to work, putting them into your oven for 5-10 minutes and baking till the edges turn just slight golden. Let cookies cool before decorating.
You can have as much as you’d like with toppings but for the video, I used a simple vegan cream cheese icing with peppermint bark shavings. The vegan icing was simply 1/2 cup of vegan butter, 1/2 cup of vegan cream cheese and 2 cups of powdered sugar (or till prime consistency).
Happy Baking my loves!
xo,
C
Check out my girl Sarah’s Salthouse Mkt Holiday Hosting Guide here: http://bit.ly/2o2rYAG
Check out my “Eat with Intention: Happy Healthy Holiday Survival Kit” at http://bit.ly/2AOgjHD
Please SUBSCRIBE, like and share if you enjoy this video!
Grab the book “Eat with Intention: Recipes and Meditations for a Life that Lights You Up” on amazon here: http://amzn.to/2cXdfQl
Work with me one on one to finally get FREE from food + body drama and tap into your body’s deep intuitive wisdom: https://cassandrabodzak.com/mentoring
In this episode of “Eat with Intention TV”, I share my favorite easy, healthy plant-based holiday appetizers. These recipes range from super basic to simple but impressive and they are perfect for hosting a healthy holiday gathering or bringing a dish to your office’s Christmas party. All of the dishes are vegan and absolutely delicious! Let me know which ones you are trying!
Check out my girl Sarah’s Salthouse Mkt Holiday Hosting Guide that I mention in the video here: http://bit.ly/2o2rYAG
Please SUBSCRIBE, like and share if you enjoy this video!
The recipes from today’s episode like the ‘spicy squash soup’ and ‘veggie balls’ are available in my book, “Eat with Intention: Recipes and Meditations for a Life that Lights You Up” grab it on amazon here: http://amzn.to/2cXdfQl
Work with me one on one to finally get FREE from food + body drama and tap into your body’s deep intuitive wisdom: https://cassandrabodzak.com/mentoring
I just had the most magical weekend taking a deep dive into my dreams, my obstacles, the ways I lie (and so do most other people!) and the personality traits that I love and the ones I’d prefer to lose. Eye-opening to say the least!
And since I know that a lot of the things I uncovered about myself while doing the two day Design Your Life program will probably hit pretty close to home for some of you so I wanted to share with you some of my biggest Ah-Ha moments as well as some of the juicy tips and tools I found super helpful! Plus — I totally got our fabulous leader (and my coach) Laurie Gerber, to record THREE videos for you guys on some of my favorite, most game-changing concepts!
I walked into the weekend totally excited to sit down and receive, receive, receive — I’m a total junkie for allowing myself to be in the mentee seat every once in a while since most of my days are spent coaching and teaching. It’s so important, in my opinion, to have a coach or advisor to see your blind spots and push you to new levels and I am no exception and have found working with Laurie personally to be quite a joy and incredibly helpful so I was excited to see what the weekend would hold for me. On Saturday morning as I was driving over I also reflected how fun it is to be going to this type of personal development workshop from a pretty good, solid place. I think a lot of times when we finally invest in ourselves we wait till we are at that total hot mess, my life is falling apart moment — I know I used to — but this time, to go when things are going pretty good (but I know they could also go even better and don’t get me wrong I totalllllly have stuff to work on! haha) was a special treat!
Some of my favorite take aways from the weekend:
1. Personal Integrity is the key to happiness.
Watch this video I recorded with Laurie here to get the full definition of Personal Integrity and why it’s so important.
Whenever you are feeling uninspired, bored or just plain old down, it’s a great time to ask yourself where your personal integrity chain is broken. Are your dreams (heart) aligned with your game plan (mind) and are you following through on the day to day actions that you are committed to in your game plan for that particular area of your life? I know for me it’s usually the daily actions. I am such an A+ dreamer, in fact, sometimes more larger than life than is helpful when creating an action plan for the next six months so we kind of lassoed by dreams down into what is realistic but still ambitious for the next year so that I could create a very real and doable on the day to day action plan. This is huge for me because — and we will get to it when we talk about lying — I have a very hard time honoring my priorities when it comes to what I do with work time. Leave a comment on the video and let me know where you tend to break the chain!
2. “You are either fighting for your dreams or you are fighting for your excuses.” – Laurie Gerber
Ugh, this is a mantra I want posted all over my computer, cellphone and home — what are you fighting for? Sometimes we don’t even realize it but we talk more about why we CAN’t have our dreams than get into the aligned action to achieve them or align ourselves with them. One of the things we did this weekend was after we wrote out our dreams, we wrote out all our obstacles. I was shocked to see how each perceived “obstacle” was really me giving energy to an excuse instead of my energy into courageous action. In the video below, Laurie and I get into what I refer to as “effective dreaming” — its the way you get crystal clear on your dreams in all the different areas of your life so that you can effectively use them as your “guiding lights” for your every day actions.
3. You can’t be a liar and expect to be happy, get your dreams or feel proud of yourself.
What? You? A liar? Never! haha Oh, how similarly I thought!! What I uncovered this weekend was just how insidious lies can be in our lives and how they are stopping us from fulling going after or getting our dreams — not to mention, it’s pretty hard to feel good about yourself when you are lying all the time.
We lie in many different ways, we out right lie – “I can’t go to the party tonight, my kids are sick.” when your kids are perfectly fine but you just don’t feel like going to the party, we lie by leaving out information — “I had a great day at work today” when we are intentionally leaving out the fact that we got a promotion as to not have our family member ask too may questions, and the lie that I found out myself to be the most guilty of –we lie when we are not honoring our ultimate truth.
For me this ah-ha was around the way I manage my time. I am very clear about my goals, and the professional ones are very ambitious and require significant time and focus yet, I was being a big ole liar when people would email me asking to “post about this” or “partner up for that” and I agreed to do it when it wasn’t actually aligned with my dreams or time priorities, I would lie when girlfriends would ask me to hang out and what I really wanted to do was buckle down and finish a work project but instead of having that difficult conversation and honoring my truth, I would just say yes and go along with it. These lies were literally zapping time and energy away from my dreams — all because I was being a lying chicken when it came to confrontation.
It’s amazing when you put your excuses, bad habits or lying into the context of directly coming in between you and your dreams how much easier it is to call them out and stop doing them!
4. Make daily (and weekly) promises that are aligned with your dreams and then consequences if you don’t keep them.
“Feeling bad is a substitute for actually doing the right thing and owning that you had a choice!” – Laurie Gerber
Promise and consequences are my favorite part of Handel Method because it actually gets you into the power seat of realizing you ALWAYS have a choice. Another example they always give is called “the million dollar test” — if someone offered you a million dollars to do X every week for a year, could you do it? You bet you could! So maybe you are saying to yourself, “I just don’t know how to lose weight, get in a regular gym routine, start my own business, etc” — ask yourself if I offered you a million dollars to figure it out — could you? I bet you could!! You are the author of your life and you always have a choice of what to make a priority.
So how does it work? Well after you get clear on your dreams, think about what deliverables you’d want accomplished in the next 6 months in that direction, then you need to find some daily tasks that would put you in the energy of accomplishing those goals. For example, one of my promises is that everyday before I do anything else on my computer, I pitch 3 agents, managers or production companies (towards my cooking show goal) and if I fail to do this, my consequence is that I have to scrub the floor of one room in my home. Yesterday, I forgot and jumped right into a client call so my kitchen floor is looking pretty darn fabulous right now and you betcha I sent those emails first thing today! Your consequences don’t have to be super painful, it should just be annoying like scrubbing my kitchen floor, it wasn’t super fun but I’m grateful for the clean floor today!
5. You are actually the master of your thoughts and YOU get to make thoughts that don’t serve you ILLEGAL!
Okay, this has been GAME-CHANGING in my life so I had to do a video to have Laurie explain this in more detail and tell you guys about how I have used thought logging to completely eliminate thoughts like “I’m so exhausted” that are totally energy vampires.
Alright my loves, I hope you enjoyed my brain dump of some of my favorite take aways from this weekend, comment on the videos and let me know what you think, if you’ve had any ah-ha’s yourself and if you are curious about attending one of the Design Your Life Weekends yourself, you can see upcoming dates here, obviously tell Laurie I sent you. And if you are curious about Handel Method and don’t want to wait till the next weekend opens up, they have an amazing online course called Inner.U that I’ve personally done myself that walks you through all these different tools and more, it helps you write your dreams, get clear on an action plan, make promises and much more. You can read all about it here and use my code CASSIE75 to get $75 dollars off right now! It’s a great treat for yourself before the New Year!
Happy dreaming and doing!
Somethings been weighing on me for a bit now, I’ve felt like I wasn’t being totally transparent with you and it wasn’t from a place of consciously lying about anything but I had been dodging and dancing around certain questions since “Eat with Intention” came out last year. Of course, this weekend being not only the full moon in Gemini (pushing all of us to stand in and communicate the truth of who we are) but also the Design Your Life weekend with Laurie Gerber of Handel Group where I’ve been learning a lot of the not so obvious ways we lie to ourselves and others (talk about ah-ha moments), this came so powerfully to the surface to be cleared.
I don’t want any secrets between us. Full transparency equals total freedom for me. It simultaneously allows me to be 100% myself and for you to decided if that’s someone you are aligned with. It’s been scary for me to come straight out with this because, to be totally honest, I hate people not liking me. However, I’m learning more and more how important these difficult conversations are and I’m refusing to let that fear get in between me being fully who I am and being integrity with my personal truth in any moment.
The intention of this video is to clear up any confusion around my eating habits and beliefs in order to create a space of full transparency between me and you. I talk about food, are relationship to it as well as listening to our body’s wisdom and honoring our personal truth a lot, so it felt needed to put this all out on the table. Our relationship is so sacred to me and I promise to be this upfront continuously going forward and call myself out when I sense I am dodging a particular subject.
I hope you can forgive me.
I hope there is something in this video that resonates with you. Please watch it till the end.
And if not, that’s okay too. I am not open or available for any cruel comments, only love is accepted in the comment box. Unsubscribes or unfollows are a much more graceful way to handle your disagreement. I send you love regardless of your thoughts of me.
As for me, I’m going to keep standing in the truth of where I’m at right now, loving myself with all my imperfections and pushing through any fears that stop me from me doing either of the aforementioned.
