VEGAN RECIPE REVIEW: Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

Normally, I don't avoid flour--so it wasn't the "flourless" that drew me into this recipe. I just happen to love coconut in cookies, and the ingredients here are some of my favorites: coconut, chocolate chips, peanut butter, and oats. How could it be anything but delicious?!

Oh She Glows is a super popular vegan blog, and while I like to try to pick recipes from lesser-known sites, this recipe had great reviews and it looked like something the whole family would really like. (Even Eli, who doesn't like "vegan food".)

The recipe I chose this week is called Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies by Oh She Glows. (I'll link to it again at the end of the post.) And as usual, I made the recipe as-written, with the exception of the fact that I did not use gluten-free oats--I eat gluten so I never buy gluten-free oats). The ingredients are similar to what you would typically expect of a cookie (minus eggs and butter!): ground flaxseed, water, shredded coconut, rolled oats, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, non-dairy chocolate chips, natural smooth peanut butter, vanilla extract, and maple syrup.

Totally forgot that I dropped the baking powder on the floor before I took this pic

First thing's first: Preheat the oven to 350 F. Then line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.

Then, it's time to make the flax egg. This is the "glue" that holds the cookies together like a chicken egg would do. You mix the ground flaxseed with water and let it sit; and eventually, it forms a more gel-like texture.

This is what it will look like later:

Next, you mix the coconut, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, and chocolate chips to a mixer. This is where I had a little problem...

The recipe calls for 1/2 cup packed brown sugar (or 68 grams). I like recipes that include the weight of the ingredients because I like to measure that way for accuracy. When I packed the brown sugar into the half-cup measuring cup, the weight was WAY more than 68 grams. So I measured the 68 grams into the half cup measuring cup and this is what it looked like:

It was a HUGE difference. So I'm not sure if the recipe meant a packed 1/4 cup and the recipe had an error, or maybe that's just what a half-cup looks like when you weigh it out. I went with the 68-gram measurement instead of packing the half-cup and hoped it would turn out!

Thankfully, there was no problem with the peanut butter. It said 1/2 cup (or 125 mL) and it was spot-on when I measured/weighed:

Anyway, first you mix the dry ingredients (plus the chocolate chips, which I found a bit odd--usually they are added at the end--but I went with it).

Then you mix the wet ingredients together--the flax egg, peanut butter, vanilla extract, and maple syrup. It makes a thick, sticky-looking peanut buttery deliciousness that I could probably eat right out of the bowl. 

Once that is smooth, you stir the peanut butter mixture into the oat mixture and mix until combined.

Then you drop the cookies onto the parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Since the cookies don't really change shape in the oven you are supposed to flatten them a bit.

The recipe said I'd get 13 cookies, but I got 14. Bonus! Before and after baking:

I let them cool completely before eating one and holy cow--they were so delicious! 

They are very chewy and dense, and a tad bit sticky (in a good way). The peanut butter is perfect--not too much, not too little. In fact, all of the ingredients seemed to be the perfect proportions--including the brown sugar. So I would definitely measure that by weight and not volume.

Jerry, Noah, Eli, and Eli's girlfriend were all here and they tried them as well. They all loved them--even Eli! They absolutely don't "taste vegan"--you could serve them to a room full of people and nobody would ever know that there aren't any eggs or dairy.

Overall, if you like chewy cookies with a variety of textures (and peanut butter), you'll probably like these. Adding nuts would be great, too, to give them some crunch! It makes a relatively small batch, so you don't have cookies lying around for days to keep grabbing when you walk by.

These cookies are a winner, and I will definitely make them when I bring a dessert to share somewhere.

You can find the full recipe for the cookies on Oh She Glows - Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies.