WOW!
Now, when I look up on Pinterest “healthy vegan peanut butter cookies,” I don’t expect much to come up. One thing that everyone NEEDS to know about me, is that I am such a peanut butter gal. It is such a guilty pleasure. While I have tried to make the switch to almond butter and cashew butter, I can never be separated from my one true love. I stumbled upon these lil guys which not only were advertised as healthy, but also vegan, gluten-free, and refined sugar free, so instantly I thought I had hit the jack pot, which I did.
(Shout out to Liz of I Heart Vegetables for creating this lovely recipe.)
This recipe only calls for six ingredients; oat flour (blended up oats), coconut sugar, vanilla extract, baking soda, salt and peanut butter, of course! I ended up not using salt because the peanut butter had enough already in it. After preheating the oven to 350 degrees, I sprayed my baking sheet with a bit of pam because I didn’t have the parchment paper that was suggested (whoopsie) and started mixing up my wet ingredients. This is where I changed up the recipe the first time, instead of using the creamy peanut butter Liz called for, I used Laura Scudder’s Natural Crunchy Peanut Butter, AKA the best peanut butter of all time, and lemme tell you, the crunchy peanut bits in these cookies CHANGED MY LIFE. I mixed together one cup of the crunchy peanut butter, 1 cup of coconut sugar, and 2 teaspoons of vanilla that I’ll admit, I eyeballed. This next part is where unless you already own oat flour, you are going to have to put a cup of oats in the blender and blend it until it becomes a nice flour consistency, which only takes about 45 seconds when on high. After that’s blended, add that into the wet mixture and this is when I realized mine was slightly dry. Because of this, I decided to add about a tablespoon of almond milk and mix, mix, mix until it has a stickier consistency. Roll em into little balls, press down with a fork to make the cute pattern, and pop them into the oven for 9 minutes!
Fair warning! These cookies will be very crumbly and will require being cooled completely before being picked up, but they are absolutely delicious!