Disclaimer: I know nothing about nutrition / diabetes. I just googled "how to reduce sugar in cookies" and made this up.
Makes 18-20 cookies
Ingredients
Dry mixture
105g rolled oats
70g choc chips
65g oat flour
35g non-bitter brewers yeast [1]
30g flaxseed meal
10g malt extract powder (optional) [2]
4g baking soda
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
100g freeze-dried strawberries, blended into a fine powder [3, can be part of dry mixture or added later, see notes]
"Wet" mixture
100g banana, mashed
35g barley malt syrup
50g canola oil
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon salt
Method
1. Mix together dry mixture in a large bowl to evenly distribute ingredients. Add strawberry powder and mix it in now if you want a subtler strawberry flavour.
2. Mix together "wet" mixture in another bowl (can be smaller than the first bowl).
3. Add mixed "wet" mixture into bowl with dry mixture and mix until combined. Add strawberry powder now if you want a stronger strawberry flavour. Chill in fridge for at least 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 180C (350F). Once dough is chilled, roll into balls (roughly golf ball sized, maybe 1.5 tablespoons each).
4. Place balls on a tray and press on them to flatten until they're about one third of the size of the ball (they don't spread very much in the oven). Bake for 10 minutes, rotating the tray halfway if your oven doesn't heat evenly. Cool on a cooling rack.
These last a week baked, but go soft after cooling. They can be frozen and thawed. Dough lasts up to days in the fridge.
Notes
[1] According to comments from the recipe this was adapted from, it's important to get non-bitter brewers yeast. Most of the flavourful ingredients in the recipe are to mask the gross taste of the brewers yeast.
[2] I think the malt extract adds a bit of nice flavour to the cookie, but it is more sugar, and may be hard to find (I got mine from a store selling stuff to brew beer), so it's fine to leave it out.
[3] Adding the blended strawberries with the dry mixture results in the pink cookies in the photo above. The strawberry flavour is more subtle. If you want a stronger strawberry flavour, mix in the strawberry after mixing the wet and dry mixtures together. Doing it this way results in little pockets of strawberry, like a strawberry version of choc-chip cookies, which gives it more of a strawberry punch. They look like the ones in the first picture, above.
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The story behind the recipe:
I offered to make lactation cookies for a pregnant friend, as this recipe came up in my RSS feed and I had it bookmarked: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2019/09/lactation-cookie-recipe.html. Said friend accepted my offer, but revealed that she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes last year (which I didn't know, as COVID-19 lockdown has meant we haven't seen each other in a long time. Not that it would have stopped me from offering). Never having made cookies for a diabetic before, I tried to adapt the original recipe and try to cut down on the sugar.
I halved the original recipe to give myself more attempts at it. This is another one of the attempts that tasted good enough for me to want to eat more than one. As I mentioned in the disclaimer above, I don't know if they are suitable for diabetics. My friend has tried a cookie and she seems OK. Baby seems OK, too.
