I have been a lot more cheaty this year with my diet. I will admit. I was on a long binge with Simple Mills cookies, which are pretty “good for you” and gluten free with lower amounts of sugar, but they changed their recipe or something (just in time for me to quit sneaking them). We had done brownies (also no flour or cane sugar) for a year and a half or longer without any cookies, and just wanted a bit of a change, which is why we started snacking on cookies in the first place. After mom died last year, I think, is when I first started eating a few cookies. We quit again about four or five months ago? I don’t know how long it has been, but I started to feel like I had gained a pound or two and wasn’t feeling as healthy – probably that and the lack of juice after my juicer broke. So I quit.
Then came VBS, and Mr. Meyers asked the congregation to help him “find the missing cookies” that they needed for VBS to go off without a hitch. So, I pulled out the recipes I’ve been saving up and found one that had three ingredients. Literally. Three. But, of course, you know I can’t ever leave any recipe well enough alone.
I added a couple or three things myself, and this recipe was born. The original recipe was from My Whole Food Life (dot com). I believe it came from a blogging conference I attended, but there’s no way to know for sure. I keep all the recipes that are approved for my current dietary needs in my recipe binder. They all get filed away in there by category and I flip through it once a week or so to make a menu. I usually skip over the dessert section, because we don’t do as much of the sweets as we used to.
The VBS cookies, though, ended up making everyone want more. So, tonight, I made another batch of peanut butter cookies. The “Brookies” in the above photo were not as good as the peanut butter cookies. I got that recipe off of Youtube by way of Pinterest. If I ever made them again, I would definitely change up a few things (like using gluten free flour instead of what it calls for). It tasted more like a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie than a chocolate chip cookie. I’m not really big on oatmeal cookies, so that wasn’t how I wanted it to turn out. If you like that, and it isn’t your first rodeo with “Paleo” type recipes, then by all means… make a pan of those Brookies and go to town.
I plan to pull back on the cookie cheats in the future, and since I’m not really supposed to have a bunch of peanut butter, either, I am happy just making a batch of these yummy cookies when I need a sweet fix every now and then. They are really RICH and yummy, and it is hard to eat more than two of them because of how full you get. I love it when sweets are strong enough and good enough to make it impossible to overdo them. I tend to overdo them when they are small little pushovers like snack-sized Simple Mills cookies!
So when you want a peanut butter cookie, make these (and then get your fill and go a while without them… moderation is key!):
INGREDIENTS:
2 Cups natural peanut butter (we like to use the stuff you make yourself in the bulk aisle, and organic is best)
1/2 Cup maple syrup
1 tsp or 3 grinds pink, celtic, or sea salt
1/4 tsp of baking powder (and if you don’t have baking powder, use 1/4 tsp cream of tartar and 1/4 tsp of baking soda)
Tablespoon or two of almond flour, oat flour, brown rice flour, gluten flour, or coconut flour (whichever you like best)
INSTRUCTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350 F
Mix all ingredients well with a spoon (no need to use a mixer – just stir well with a spoon in a medium sized bowl)
Roll tablespoon sized balls of dough onto a greased cookie sheet
Bake each sheet of cookies for 8 minutes, remove briefly from oven to use a fork to flatten and cross-hatch the top in classic Peanut-Butter Cookie style
Bake for another 2-3 minutes or until slightly browned on bottoms (you may have to take a tiny pinch of one cookie to see if the bottoms are browning as they usually brown first)
Do not over-cook!
Remove from oven and cool before removing them from the pan
They taste great crumbled on ice-cream and even if you have to eat them in a bowl with a spoon… because we understand that leaving them on that pan when they are warm is reallllllllly hard to do! I also saw an Instagram post recently of Peanut Butter cookies that were … wait for it…. DIPPED IN CHOCOLATE. YES, half of them was coated in amazing chocolate. If I were to do this…. and I may someday… I would use Lily’s stevia-sweetened chocolate, melted over the stove, and dip the cooled cookies in it. If you do this, you MUST send me a photo! I’d love to hear what you think of these cookies. I was pleasantly surprised that they are so tasty.