These vegan chocolate cookies contain no nuts, no dairy and are packed with so many good-for-you ingredients, like oats! Plus, they make use of pantry-cupboard ingredients — no fresh eggs, milk or butter required. If you don’t have oat flour, don’t worry. It’s easy to make your own from ordinary oats. You just need a basic food processor.
Many gluten-free, vegan chocolate cookie or cake recipes make use of almond flour. While it’s delicious, it is expensive. Nuts, while good for us, are also high in calories. Plus some people are seriously allergic to them. So, I decided to try find an alternative that would give the same texture and work well as an almond flour substitute… Enter sunflower seeds!
Sunflower seeds are the new almonds
You heard it here first! These vegan chocolate cookies make use of one cup of sunflower seed “flour”. I always have sunflower seeds at home, because I add them to my muesli, toast them for salads or use them to make pesto. So, I pulled out my trusty little Kenwood food processor and blitzed them up. You can also use a coffee bean grinder — it will just take a little longer as you have to do it in small batches. It worked perfectly — I was so stoked!
You can get sunflower seeds from Wellness Warehouse at R47 for 500g.
The flavour is neutral enough — you can’t taste the seeds in the cookies. Sunflower seeds are more budget-friendly and then everyone can eat the cookies! (Great for lunchbox snacks for kids too.)
Sweeteners and sugar substitutes for cookies
These vegan chocolate cookies are treats after all… And while they’re not overly sweet, they do contain sugar. Here are some recommendations for what to use and substitutes.
Silan Date Syrup is 100% plant-based with no added sugars. Wellness Warehouse also stocks and delivers coconut sugar and raw cane sugar. You can also try a product called Sweetly, which is a low-kJ blend of non-nutritive sweeteners, as a sugar substitute.
Try these healthy orange and oat cookies for another family-friendly treat.
