Nut Butter Chickpea Cookies

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I love baking. I love food. I love creating.

I wanted to make a healthy snack-type-dessert. These essentially can be edible cookie dough dip too, as some may be familiar with the ever so popular chickpea cookie dough substitution. If you’d like to just make the cookie dough dip, leave out the baking powder as it would be unnecessary. Then eat immediately ;)

I added some freshly ground flax seeds. I ground up 1/4 cup and saved the rest in a sealed container in the freezer. I’ll use them later in my yogurt. You may omit these if you don’t have.

I used 6 tablespoons of raw honey and I found that to be a tad too sweet for me, so next time definitely 1/4 cup will happen.

Check out the awesome honey comb my parent’s brought me back from North Carolina..

For the chocolate chips, I decided to use a healthier version of M&M’s that I purchased at Whole Foods as a random ingredient that I wanted to inspire me in baking.

These Sunspire Sundrops (sounds so lovely) are colored with beet juice, beta carotene, and caramel coloring. There is no palm oil or other common hydrogenated oil in these candies. The only downside about this more natural M&M is that the color is a tad faded (as you can see) and in baking does not come out the most visually appealing, but honestly I’d take nutrition over appearance any day. They tasted perfect in these cookies and taste superb in general. You may use normal chocolate chips or even leave them out completely. I think the cookies tasted wonderful sans the chocolate too.

Ingredients:

scant 2 cups cooked chickpeas (garbanzo beans) or 1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed well! (no salt added)

1/4-1/2 cup raw honey (I used 6 tbsp)

1/2 cup nut butter (no salt/sugar added) (almond, cashew, sunflower, peanut or any nut butter would be perfect)

2 tsp vanilla

1-2 tbsp whole flaxseed, freshly ground (optional)

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 cup chocolate chips (I used Sunspire Baking Sundrops) (optional)

Directions:

Add whole flaxseeds to a mixer, blender, or even magic bullet (yes I had to use one of these and it worked swell) and grind until all seeds become ground. Should be fairly quick. If you have any flax leftover, store in an opaque, sealed tight container in the freezer.

Combine the rest of the ingredients except the chocolate chips in the mixer and blend well. You may need to stir a few times to get everything blended equally but it’s not really an issue.

Add in chocolate chips and stir manually.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line a baking sheet with foil and spray non-stick cooking spray. Then take the batter and form small, round cookie-shaped circles equally spread apart on the baking sheet.

Flatten them down a bit as they don’t really rise/spread out. So what you see is what you get.

Bake for about 15-20 minutes and then let cool. The bottoms will be the only thing really turning brown. These cookies harden up a bit once cooled, so don’t worry about how they’re still soft once out of the oven.

Eat!

Nutrition facts include chocolate!