CHICKPEA CASHEW COOKIES

These heavenly vegan cookies are so good, they're dangerous. They taste just as good, if not better, than those made with flour and sugar, but they're chock-full of nutrition. They're so good, you might eat the whole batch right out of the oven. You have been warned!

THE COOKIE

  · chickpeas
  · cashews
  · baking powder

  · vanilla

THE FIXINS

  · dairy-free chocolate chips
  · toasted pecans


http://www.vegancookery.net/2015/04/the-best-vegan-flourless-chickpea.html#more

GOOSE'S VEGAN

(flourless, oilless, sugarless, great tasting, and great for you!)

So, here's what you will need to make the basic cookie:

• one ~15oz can of chickpeas

• one cup of raw cashews

• 1/4 tsp baking powder

• 1/2 tsp vanilla

And here's what makes them ZING:

• 10oz of non-dairy or sugar-free mini morsels

• half cup of toasted chopped pecans

You'll be cooking that at @ 350°F / 175°C for 25-30 minutes. 

And here's the method in four easy steps ....

Step 1 - Prepare your toasted pecans. 

One of the parts of this recipe that makes it so good is the play of chocolate against pecans. To make that work well, you can't just buy toasted pecans and hope they'll work, and you can't use raw pecans. You have to toast your pecans to bring out their OooMPH.  I keep raw pecans ordered from online in the freezer, because nuts can go bad if left out for too long, and the last thing you want to ruin your perfect cookies are rancid oils. To toast some, I just take out a handful and spread them on a toaster oven tray. I set the timer for about 4-5 minutes. The thing about pecans is that they burn easily. You want them to go long enough that you can start to smell them and they hiss and crackle, but you don't want them to burn, and that's a fine line. But, it's a delicious fine line, and if you know how to find it, it'll give any dish you add it to just that much more POP.

So, step one is to preheat your oven to 350°F / 175°C  and toast a handful of pecans, however you want to do that. Set them aside to cool a bit while you make the dough/batter.

Step 2 - Make the dough

Place one cup of raw cashews in a food processor. Again, I freeze my nuts, so when I make these, the nuts are frozen. I don't think it will matter if they're room temperature, as long as they're not roasted. You want raw cashews to get the creaminess that makes this work.  To that cup of cashews, add 1/4 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp of vanilla. We make our vanilla at home, but there's no reason extract, powdered, or ground vanilla wouldn't work as well. 

Now for the magic part.... 

Gently shake your can of chickpeas, open it, and dump the whole thing into the food processor. You want the garbanzo beans for their flour and you want the aquafaba (liquid) for its binding properties. One 15 oz can has just the perfect balance of both for a cup of cashews.  Pop on the food processor lid and give it a few pulses. Let the food processor run until it's all well combined and you end up with a "batter" that looks like this:

Step 3 - Add in the fixins

Now that your "dough" is nice and blended, dump it into a large bowl, chop your pecans and open up your bag of mini morsels. I prefer a lot of chocolate. If you're using larger chocolate chips or you want more nut than chocolate flavor, decrease the amount of chocolate chips and increase the amount of nuts. The cookie pictured, and my preference, is 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup of chopped pecans, and the whole 10oz bag of morsels.  Just dump them into the batter, stir it up, and you're done. 

But wait - at this point you're going to want to lick the spoon, try some raw batter, or sneak a taste. I don't recommend it.  It will taste absolutely nothing like the final cookie. It will be very much flavored like chickpeas. 

Step 4 - Bake them!

The remaining magic of this recipe happens in the oven, where the nuts and garbanzos bake and the vanilla infuses into the cookie with the chocolate.  So just dollop those onto a baking mat or parchment paper like so:

Whatever shape you make these will be the shape of your final cookie. They do not settle like normal chocolate chip cookies do, because they aren't full of oil and sugar. You could, if you really wanted to, add in some sugar or oil to get that effect, but it's sooo not necessary. These come out perfectly fluffy when they're done, and they're pretty resistant to over-baking, unlike sugar/oil based cookies. 

Place them in your preheated oven and bake them at 350°F / 175°C for 25-30 minutes, or until the spiky bits are going dark brown. You don't want the overall cookie to brown too much. You're looking for a golden hue over the whole cookie and they should be dry to the touch. When mine are done, they look like this:

The insides are simply amazing! Go ahead and eat them all... I have to admit, I've made this for breakfast before ... because they're just that GOOD! And good for you ...

A word on salt. 

You might also be wondering about salt... there's no salt in my recipe, though you could add some if you want. I don't use it because my can of chickpeas has three ingredients: chickpeas, water, and SALT. They're plenty salty as it is. If you're using homemade chickpeas or find some that don't have any salt, then go ahead and add 1/4 tsp to 1/2 tsp depending on how salty you like your cookies. 

Enjoy!