Don’t knock these peanut butter cauliflower cookies until you try them – grain-free and no refined sugar … but with cauliflower for the added crunch!

It looks like I’m becoming known for some of my strange food combinations.  Like these peanut butter mystery cookies.  Or putting cauliflower into a chocolate dip.  Just as some examples.  But you know what?  They work for me.  And honestly, I’m only putting recipes on this website that I personally like.

And so I introduce you to these peanut butter cauliflower cookies.  To be completely transparent, this recipe came about because I was wanting to use up some cauliflower rice but me being one of the biggest Cookie Monsters out there, I thought I could combine the two objectives!  And as I was sifting through my recipe folder, I came across my peanut butter quinoa cookie recipe … here’s how my thought process panned out:

“Hmm – I haven’t made these cookies in a while.  But I don’t have any quinoa.  Cauliflower rice kind of looks like quinoa, doesn’t it?  I wonder how putting cauliflower rice in a cookie would taste.”

And so the recipe was born.  I took these cookies to work and challenged my colleague to choose the secret ingredients (similar to my mystery cookie challenge).  I had to tell them it was a vegetable … but even then they didn’t guess.  But what came as a shock to me was revealing cauliflower as the veggie in these cookies led one of my co-workers to be grateful he didn’t have any … he had recently had a stroke and the doctors told him not to have cauliflower for a few months as his blood thinners worked their magic.  So be warned – don’t use cauliflower with people who have recently had strokes!

But for everyone else, give these cookies a go and let me know what you think!

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Peanut butter cauliflower cookies

(Gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, grain-free, no refined sugar)

Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes

Total Time 20 minutes

Servings 16

Ingredients

• 1 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup almond flour
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup cauliflower rice uncooked
• 1 tsp baking soda

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F and prepare two baking pans with parchment paper.

2. Combine the peanut butter and maple syrup until creamy.  If peanut butter is difficult to stir, put in the microwave for approximately 30 seconds.

3. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.

4. Place tablespoonfuls of batter onto the parchment paper and bake for 10-12 minutes.  Allow to cool on pan before moving to wire rack to cool completely.

Grain-free, egg, gluten and dairy-free chewy and yummy s’more cookies – perfect for any time of year!

Ah yes, the American summer.  Full of BBQ’s, fire pits, camping, roasting marshmallows … and s’mores.  For years my mother would love it when she received care packages from friends and family in the US, because they would undoubtedly contain boxes of graham crackers.  (Just as a side note … Australians would call these ‘grey-am’ crackers, whereas we’ve found many Americans call them ‘gram’ crackers).  And then, she would get some chocolate and marshmallows.  And I remember trying to toast some marshmallows using the gas stove-top, to put in between the graham crackers with the chocolate.  And shove the whole thing in my mouth.  Ah, good times … good times.

Fast forward to now, when we are actually living in the US and there’s campfires, fire-pits and other things all around.  Now, my kids don’t really get into s’mores that much – because they are pretty messy – so they’ve invented some other combination of roasted marshmallows plunging into puddings … but that’s a story for another day!  And it’s expensive to buy gluten-free graham crackers.  Yes, I have made s’more cookies before, including my love of peanut butter, but these s’more cookies are so much different to that recipe, I dare you to try both and let me know which you prefer!

So these are totally grain-free, and Paleo-friendly if you choose your marshmallows wisely.  Or you could make your own (I haven’t quite gotten that enthusiastic yet).  And they are even egg-free – I’ve started to discover uses of beef gelatin in baking so beware (you could totally substitute an egg for the gelatin if you need/want to!).  But know that there’s no refined sugar in the cookies themselves but they are so chewy, with the right amount of sweetness, and they hold together so well.  Who needs the classic messiness when you can have all the flavors in a portable cookie form?

And these cookies have gotten the thumbs up from two of the pickiest eaters I know (being my husband and son!) so give them a go and let me know what you think!

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S'more cookies

(Paleo, grain-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, no refined sugar)

Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes

Total Time 20 minutes

Servings 12

Ingredients

• 1 cup creamy almond butter
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tbs beef gelatin
• 1/2 cup dairy-free chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup mini marshmallows

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F and prepare a baking tray with parchment paper.

2. Combine the almond butter and honey until well mixed.  Add the vanilla and baking soda and mix well.

3. Sprinkle the beef gelatin on top of the batter and mix well.

4. Fold in the chocolate chips and marshmallows until well dispersed.

5. Drop batter by tablespoonfuls onto the parchment paper and bake for 10 minutes.  Allow to cool completely on the tray before attempting to move.

Recipe Notes

If you do not have sensitivities regarding eggs, feel free to use 1 egg instead of the gelatin.

These sunbutter chocolate chip cookies are nut-free, and vegan, but you’d never know it from the awesome texture and flavor!

Who else loves procrasti-baking?  Or is it just me?  You know, when you have some time on your hands, and you don’t quite know what to do with yourself?  Now personally, I head into the kitchen and wonder what I can make with whatever ingredients I have lying around in the pantry and fridge.  Usually with some sort of nut butter and chocolate combination.  Who’s with me?

We recently changed churches and are in the process of getting to know a whole new group of people.  Fortunately for me, there are a significant number of ladies that have expressed their preference for gluten and dairy-free foods, so I’m in my element of serving them with my love language – baking treats for them!  And I started thinking about what I could make for them.

Combining my wanting to make cookies for my new group of friends, and having a few hours to myself in the kitchen, helped these sunbutter chocolate chip cookies to be born.  I’d like to provide a link for you to see what this recipe was adapted from, but to be honest, it was just using my experience to see what needed to be added in terms of taste (because you know I’m the Cookie Dough Monster!), and texture.

But, everyone who had a taste of these cookies fell in love with them.  It’s just a unique texture and flavor, but so suitable for so many people with special dietary issues.  I hope you love these sunbutter chocolate chip cookies as much as we did!

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Sunbutter chocolate chip cookies

(Paleo, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, no refined sugar)

Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 12 minutes

Total Time 22 minutes

Servings 14

Ingredients

• 1 cup sunflower seed butter
• 1/2 cup coconut sugar
• 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tbs coconut flour
• 1/4 cup tapioca flour
• 3 oz dairy-free chocolate chunks

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F and prepare two baking pans with parchment paper.

2. Combine the sunflower seed butter with the coconut sugar and applesauce until well mixed.

3. Add in the baking soda and two types of flours and mix well.

4. Fold in the chocolate chunks until well dispersed.

5. Drop tablespoonfuls of dough onto the prepared baking pans, allowing 1" gap between balls.

6. Bake for 12 minutes or until slightly brown.  Allow to cool on the tray before moving to a wire rack.

7. Store for up to 5 days in a sealed container.

Read about my experiments with 0 calorie sweeteners and cookies – and what I thought of the end results!

By now, you probably have heard of the ketogenic diet.  Where you focus on high fat, low carb foods to encourage your body to burn fat for energy, rather than carbohydrates.  Many people have found great benefits on this diet, with claims of curing cancer, improving cognitive abilities in people with autism, and lots of claims for weight loss.  You can read more about the keto diet here if you’re interested.

Now I’ve always been a little skeptical of this diet – I struggle with the concept of cutting out fruit due to the high carb content.  Now, I know that you can manage to have fruit on the keto diet, if you’re careful about when and at what time you have it, but I haven’t ever really wanted to look at this as a viable way of eating for me.  Until this year.  When I have gained a significant amount of weight due to weird hormone issues that I won’t go into!  But when both my doctor and a nutritionist friend recommend increasing the amount of fat that I eat, and lowering the amount of carbs, I started to listen.  Also, a few people at church have recently started the keto diet and I wanted to bake something for them.

So I started investigating natural 0 calorie sweeteners – and two of them were highlighted in almost every place I looked.  Stevia and erythritol came up trumps every time as a natural 0 calorie, low carb sweetener for keto baked goods.  And I went to my local grocery store and bought one of each – thinking that I would make the same recipe with each of them and see which one I liked the best.

Using my flourless peanut butter cookie recipe as a basis (i.e. 1 cup peanut butter, 1 egg, 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp baking soda), I set out to see which 0 calorie sweetener would taste the best.  Mind you, I used almond butter instead of peanut butter, because that’s what I had in the pantry at that time!  And I did look at the equivalent amounts of each of them to mimic the appropriate amount of ‘normal sugar’.

And here’s the results:

The Stevia cookies looked like cookies.  Pretty similar to what I’ve seen many times over in my kitchen.  The Swerve (erythritol) ones spread out a lot more and were quite crumbly.  But it all came down to the taste.

• The Swerve cookies tasted ok.  Not great, but ok.
• The Stevia cookies had this serious metallic taste.  I couldn’t even eat one bite of them.  And Grant was the same – he actually spat it out into the trash when he tried them.  And he’s tried some interesting combinations of mine previously, so that’s saying something!

And then I had some really bad stomach cramps that night as well.

So let me just say that I may experiment a little more with 0 calorie sweeteners to try to help out the ladies at church, but I’ll take it a little easy … for my stomach and taste buds to recover!

Have you had any experience with 0 calorie sweeteners?  Let me know which ones you’ve tried and liked in the comments below!

Until next time, enjoy cooking at home (with or without 0 calorie sweeteners!)

Sarah