These Chickpea Peanut Butter Cookies are soft, fudgy peanut butter cookies made with cooked chickpeas and no flour. It’s a tasty, healthy peanut butter cookie recipe packed with 8 grams of proteins per cookie, perfect for peanut butter lovers. It’s 100% gluten-free, dairy-free, and refined sugar-free!
I love baking with cooked chickpeas, also known as canned chickpeas or garbanzo beans. It is so convenient to open a can of chickpeas, drain, dry, and pulse them into a chickpea cookie dough! Chickpeas also create the fudgiest blondies or creamy vegan cookie dough dip.
But first, let us see how you can make healthy peanut butter cookies with canned chickpeas.
Why You’ll Love These Cookies
These Chickpea Peanut Butter Cookies are a version of my Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies that use chickpeas as the main cookie dough ingredient. It gives the cookies a great texture without bringing a chickpea taste.
Chickpeas are an amazing ingredient that can be made into anything, from replacing eggs in a Chickpea Omelette to creating a perfect meringue in my Vegan Lemon Meringue Pie.
These healthy peanut butter cookies taste like vegan blondies, and you will not taste the chickpea at all.
Ingredients and Substitutions
Chickpeas only make the cookies a little healthier, boosting the plant-based protein of the recipe along with the other ingredients, including:
- Chickpea – The recipe uses one can of drained, pat-dried chickpeas. One can of chickpeas, also called garbanzo beans, weighs 400g/15oz, including the chickpea liquid. However, this chickpea cookie recipe does not use chickpea water, so you need 1 cup + 1/2 cup of canned chickpeas, about 250g.
- Oat Flour – Make your own oat flour following my tutorial. Or almond flour would work too, but almond chickpea cookie dough makes cookies softer and more fragile. Another option is spelt flour, or even all-purpose flour would work, though a little less healthy.
- Natural Peanut Butter – no added sugar, no added oil. You can also use natural almond butter to decrease saturated fat or any nut butter you love, like cashew butter. If you are allergic to all nuts, you can use sunflower seed butter. With my tips on how to avoid green cookies with sunflower seed butter, you can even keep the same vivid color!
- Maple Syrup or any refined sugar-free liquid sweetener you like. My favorite options are agave syrup or coconut nectar.
- Baking Powder – some baking powders are not gluten-free, so you can swap baking powder with half the amount of baking soda.
- Chocolate Chips – peanut butter chocolate chip cookies are even tastier, so add 1/2 cup of your favorite dark (or dairy-free) milk vegan chocolate chips in the cookie dough!
How To Make Chickpea Cookies
In order to make chickpea cookies, you first need to prepare the cookie dough.
- Start by opening a can of chickpeas. A regular can is usually 15 oz (400g). Then, drain the chickpeas into a sieve, rinse and place on a clean towel. It is better if you roughly dry the chickpeas by rubbing the towel onto them. This prevents overly moist cookies.
- Finally, place the chickpeas into a food processor mounted with the S blade attachment along with the rest of the ingredients. You must use a food processor, not a blender, to make this chickpea cookie dough. In fact, blender jugs are too narrow, and the cookie batter would not blend very well.
- Use a food processor and blend in 30-second bursts, stopping the food processor every 30 seconds to scrape down the sides of the bowl.
- Repeat this blending/scrapping process a few times until it forms a sticky thick chickpea cookie dough batter.
- Add the chocolate chips to the batter. Since this is a vegan chickpea peanut butter cookie recipe, I recommend using dark chocolate chips. However, vegan milk chocolate chips taste great if you can find some at the store.
- This peanut butter chickpea cookie batter is very sticky, so you must wet your hands before rolling the dough into cookie balls.
- Then, use a cookie rack covered with a piece of greased parchment paper. I recommend greasing the paper with coconut oil to ensure the cookies will not stick to the paper.
- Next, place each chickpea peanut butter cookie dough ball onto the tray, leaving half an inch of space between each.
- Finally, press the cookie dough ball with your hands to flatten it into a cookie shape. Do not forget to wet your hands often if the batter becomes too sticky.
- Bake the cookies in the oven. These chickpea cookies are soft and fudgy. They won’t get crunchy or harden in the oven. As a result, they bake really fast, usually between 12 to 15 minutes maximum at 350°F (180°C) in regular mode. If you are using the convection mode of your oven, they bake even faster, between 10 minutes and 12 minutes.
- Remove the chickpea peanut butter cookies from the oven when they are golden on top. They will be very soft, but a crust will have formed on the top.
- Then, let them cool down for another 10 minutes on the cookie rack before transferring them onto a cooling rack.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can store chickpea cookies in the fridge or in the pantry for up to 4 days.
Yes, freeze them in a box and defrost them on a plate at room temperature for 3 hours before eating.
Yes, canned chickpeas are always pre-cooked. In fact, almost all of the legumes and vegetables that are sold canned are cooked to kill germs and bacteria.
Chickpea flour is excellent for making many healthy recipes. It’s a healthy flour, rich in nutrients, that behaves very similarly to regular flour.
However, some recipes like this one call for canned chickpeas. When that’s the case, it’s better not to swap the canned chickpeas for the flour. They are not necessarily interchangeable.
Yes, don’t discard the water from the can! Chickpea water, also called aquafaba, can be used as an egg replacer for making recipes like my Vegan Lemon Meringue Pie.
More Vegan Chickpea Dessert Recipes
I love using canned chickpeas or chickpea flour in my vegan recipes.
It adds protein to your vegan baking recipes and tastes amazing. Below you can find some other delicious recipes using chickpeas:
Did You Like This Recipe?
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Chickpea Peanut Butter Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cup Canned Chickpeas - drained, pat dry in a towel (1 can of 15 oz)
- ¾ cup Peanut Butter (Unsalted) - (note 1)
- ⅓ cup Maple Syrup - (note 2)
- ¼ cup Oat Flour - (note 3)
- 2 teaspoons Vanilla Extract
- 1 teaspoon Baking Powder
- ½ cup Dairy-Free Dark Chocolate Chips - (note 4)
- ¼ teaspoon Salt
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Line a cookie tray with parchment paper. Slightly oil the paper with coconut oil. Set aside.
- Open the can of chickpea. Mine is 400g/15oz. Wash and drain chickpeas under tap water in a sieve.
- Transfer the chickpeas onto a towel and roughly dry them by rubbing the towel onto the chickpeas. If some chickpea 'skin' comes off, remove it, but you don't have to remove the whole skin for the recipe to work fine as long as the chickpeas are roughly drained.
- Place the chickpeas into the food processor with the rest of the ingredients except the chocolate chips!
- Blend on high speed for 30 seconds, stop, scrape down the bowl of the food processor and repeat these actions a few times until the batter is smooth and there are almost no lumps of chickpeas. It should not take more than 2 minutes in total.
- Remove the blade, and stir in the dark chocolate chips with a spatula.
- The batter is sticky and thick, so wet your hands, then grab some batter from the bowl (1 cookie is about 2 tablespoons) and roll the cookie dough into a cookie ball between your hands.
- Place the chickpea cookie dough ball on the prepared tray, leaving 1 cm space between each cookie. These cookies will not expand in the oven.
- Slightly wet your hands again and flatten each cookie with your hands into a round cookie shape.
- Bake for 12-14 minutes or until the top is golden brown and crusty on top. The cookies stay very soft, and that is normal. It is a fudgy cookie.
- Cool on the rack for 10 minutes, then slide a spatula under each cookie to transfer them on a cooling rack.
- Cool for 1 hour or until they reach room temperature before eating.
Oh, my! These really turned out wonderful. I’m still very much in the learning stage with vegan baking. I can’t wait for my daughter to come and be able to have one. I used date syrup bc that is what I had, so they turned out a bit darker than if I would have used Maple syrup. Next time will switch it up. Thank you, Carine for this wonderful recipe. ❤️
Thank you so much for trying my recipes – and such a wonderful feedback on the cookies!
What can I use besides maple syrup. We are cutting down on sugars. Could I use monk fruit
You can use sugar-free maple syrup made from fiber and monk fruit. But they usually dry out the cookie batter since they contains lots of fiber.
You guys! I made these two days ago and totally forgot the peanut butter and guess what?! They were still really, really good! Can’t wait to make them again, but do so correctly! lol
Thank you for the recipe!
Can I use Besan/Chickpea flour instead of Almond flour?
Th recipe calls for oat flour or almond flour. I didn’t try chickpea or besan in this cookie recipe because it tends to harden and toughen cookies more than oat/almond flour.
Made these last night and they are so good! Thanks for a healthy cookie recipe I will definitely make these again & again!
These are amazing!! They remind me of a super soft Crumbl cookie! Can I freeze the dough and bake them straight out of the freezer?
Thanks for the lovely comment. I am not sure how it will work baked straight out the freezer, it should work but take longer to bake. Let me know if you try!
I am new to the whole beans-in-baked goods-life, and this recipe was a great way to start that journey!! I did alter it slightly, I chose the almond flour but was a little nervous about the “delicate” product results described from that option, so I added 1 large egg and 1 TBSP coconut flour. They came out perfect!!! Made 15 2TBSP sized cookies, nice and gooey and chocolatey, wonderful texture, not delicate or messy…I could not have been more pleased!!!!!!
Can I substitute Garbanzo Bean Flour for the chickpeas and oat flour?
I don’t think it will work very well with chickpeas, I didn’t try these alternative, feel free to experiment.
Incredible cookie recipe!
Highly recommend you try it.
Thank you for sharing your creativity with us.
I made these today, really delicious! But I got 24 cookies out of the recipe. I thought they’d taste bean-y like black bean brownies too, but warm or cold, these cookies are great!