Om nom nom nom cookies.

These are a gluten free, veganised version of a peanut brownie recipe from the good ol' Edmonds Cookbook. You know the one, everyones mum has a copy and it features recipes like "Nun's toast" and "Microwave mince and potato ring". Sounds... interesting? Anyway peeps in the Northern hemisphere will probably think of soft chewy squares of chocolatey goodness when I say brownies, but these babies are most definitely cookies. Crunchy, peanutty cookies. The recipe is pretty adaptable and I just use what I have around. I've found one of the most important thing when baking gluten-free is to have a variety of flours. Preferably a legume flour, a grain flour and some kind of super light starch. Recipes that don't panic when you don't have exactly the right ingredients are my kind of recipes.

For these cookies it is recommended that you have a toddler on hand to spill a little of each ingredient, make sure you are both covered in cookie gunk and make some odd shaped cookies that will cook too fast and burn. If you don't have a toddler you could probably fake these steps yourself but I give no guarantees that your cookies will come out as awesome. Consider yourself warned.

The stuff you need:

1 egg substitute. You can use a product like No-Egg or a tablespoon of ground flaxseed or chia seeds. Up to you.
125 grams vegan margarine.
2/3 cup o' sugar. I used raw sugar but it doesn't dissolve well so you can see the grains. If this matters too you, use white cane sugar.
1/4 cup of ground almonds
1/2 cup chickpea flour. Or any bean flour. Soy, pea or whatever you have around should work.
1/2 cup brown rice flour. Or white rice flour, that works too. I just like the wholegrains when I can get em.
1/2 cup or tapioca starch, super fine corn flour or potato starch. The key to this part is that it is super light.
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp cocoa
1 cup of raw peanuts
1/2 tsp salt.


The stuff you do:

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C (that's about 350 f). Mix together your egg sub, margarine and sugar. In a separate bowl sift your flours, cocoa and baking powder and mix together with the salt and peanuts. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Or if you're me, you'll do the opposite because you always use the wrong sized bowls. All of these steps involve mess and spilling by the toddler so don't forget to wipe up constantly until you step on a glob of sticky margarine and sugar mix (with bare feet). At this point you should probably give up trying to keep anything clean. 

Toddler stirring -not very efficient but it does spread around the mess so well.

Shape into wee cookie shaped shapes and lay on a greased tray (Yes I've used a roasting dish instead of a cookie tray. We don't eat meat so it's not as gross as it sounds. The only roasting this pan does is of the vegetable kind.) Now, your toddler should poke some holes in the cookie dough. Roughly smoosh them back into a cookie shape. Your toddler will probably copy you by flattening any cookies she didn't already poke and saying "smash" a lot. Once this is done, bake for about 20 minutes or longer. Probably longer.

Complete with holes poked and weirdly shaped toddler made cookies.

While the cookies are baking you might want to wash up and do the dishes. If your toddler doesn't get completely soaked (highly unlikely) then make sure you tip a few litres of dirty dish water on her and the floor to keep things authentic. If you have a toddler but you don't wash your dishes by hand because you have a dishwasher, then pffft.

I find these need ages to bake, especially if I'm impatient and my oven hasn't completely heated. Leave them in the oven until they are about to burn. You want them crunchy, if you take em out too soon they'll be soft in the centre. Not raw soft, just not crunchy. I have been known to take them out, let em cool and then chuck them back into the oven when I realised they weren't as crunchy as I wanted them. It worked, don't be too stressy about The Baking Rules for this recipe. You can mop up the dish water while they cool.

Bonus crunchy mama points: I'm not a big fan of labelling foods as good or bad, low fat or fattening (got a wee bit carried away with the raw food obsession a few years back*) but I do like sneaking super nutritious foods into my kids when they aren't looking. The original recipe called for 1.5 cups of white wheat flour which is pretty devoid of nutrients. By switching out the white flour for chickpea and brown rice flours and adding the ground almonds you get a sweet treat that is loaded with good stuff like protein, iron, calcium and lots of the good fats.


*Felt amazing but spent far too much energy thinking about and preparing food except not in a good way. It's nice to have a balance and enjoy eating without guilt.