Chocolate Chickpea Cookies

Chocolate Chickpea Cookies – These Chocolate Chickpea Cookies are where dessert meets health food! Loaded with protein-rich garbanzo beans, full of antioxidants from raw cacao powder, and sweetened with bananas, maple syrup, and coconut sugar, these cookies could justify the nutrients of a breakfast, and the rich, chewy, and sweet flavor of a dessert! You simply have to try these.

- Table of Contents -

1. Healthy Chocolate Cookies
2. Swap This for That for Healthy Chocolate Chickpea Cookies
3. Secret Ingredient Chocolate Chickpea Cookies
4. More Desserts with Plant Foods
5. Kitchen Favorites

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Healthy Chocolate Cookies

While the words “healthy”, “chocolate”, and “cookies” seldom go together, this recipe changes that! A giant misconception about healthy eating (that has only been exemplified by diet culture over the past years) is that whether a food is deemed healthy or unhealthy all comes down to the calorie and sugar counts. When eating a junk-food heavy diet, calorie counts and sugar do matter! When eating a clean, intuitively-drive, healthy diet, in our opinion, calories and sugar are not the end all be all (given you do not have any health issues that dictate your intake).

Here at Clean Cuisine, it is our philosophy to never restrict, but instead, replace! Because of this, we have made it our mission to make healthy versions of all of our favorite “junk foods” to share with you! This way, we don’t have to suppress our cravings, resist delicious food, or portion out serving sizes. We simply eat what we crave, until we’re full and satisfied! True clean eating is what real food freedom looks like! Not only do we mentally feel better not having a fear around thoroughly enjoying every type of food, but we feel physically better and healthier as well. It’s a win win!

Back to this Chickpea Cookie Recipe. This Recipe tastes like your typical chocolate cookie, but instead of consisting of empty calorie sugars and carbs, is full of nutrient-rich ingredients! So how did we exactly make this recipe so healthy?

Swap This for That for Healthy Chocolate Chickpea Cookies

Making a healthy chocolate cookie all comes down to swapping out a few ingredients. Strategically swapped, you’ll never taste the difference between a healthy cookie, and one full of junky ingredients! Here’s how we made this Chickpea Cookies so healthy…

Swap All-Purpose Flour for Gluten Free Flour

Wheat four is simply not what it used to be (especially in America), and has been studied to cause inflammatory responses, and negatively effect gut health in many people (even those without true gluten “allergies” or Celiac’s Disease). It is one food many health professionals especially recommend you avoid if you have, or are prone to autoimmune diseases.

Thankfully, measure-for-measure gluten free flour is easily accessible these days, and with the right brand, can taste identical to it’s gluten-filled counterpart. In this recipe, we simply chose gluten-free flour instead of wheat flour, making for a much cleaner cookie.

Swap White Sugar for Natural Sweeteners

The issue with white sugar is not the cane sugar in and of itself, but instead, the fact that it has been so refined. Because of this, refined white sugar is void of nutrients, and essentially, an empty calorie.

Just because refined-sugar is unhealthy, doesn’t mean you need to avoid all sweets! Instead, try swapping out empty-calorie sweeteners for natural sweeteners. The difference in natural sweeteners is that they offer nutrients, therefore, your body can make use out of them. When consuming empty calories, your body may be able to use these for immediate energy, but anything remaining is just stored as fat.

In this recipe, we used bananas, coconut sugar, and maple syrup as natural sweeteners! Just as sweet and tasty, yet much more nutrient-rich.

Swap Cocoa for Cacao

While cocoa and cacao have similar spellings, they’re actually very different! While cocoa (the most commonly used chocolate powder in recipes) is highly-refined, therefore, losing much of it’s nutrients, cacao is cold-pressed to remove the cacao butter, and roasted at low temperatures. Raw cacao contains up to four times the antioxidants of traditional cocoa powder. This makes it a food with the highest antioxidant value! It has 95,000 ORAC value score per 100gms.

You read that right…cacao is actually a health food with many health benefits! The great thing is, it’s easy to find cacao powder in most grocery stores these days, and even chocolate chips made with cacao in health food stores! When an option, cacao is always the healthiest choice.

Swap Canola or Vegetable Oil for a Healthier Option

Canola and vegetable oil, while sometimes marketed as “healthy” are actually pro-inflammatory, highly-refined, and not optimal choices for our health. In this recipe, we went with palm oil instead. Unrefined red palm oil has an abundance of phytonutrients and a high concentration of antioxidant vitamin E, among much more!

Don’t have palm oil in your kitchen? Some other oils we often use in baking are coconut oil, and avocado oil!

Secret Ingredient Chocolate Chickpea Cookies

Above are some of our go-to methods for cleaning up any general dessert recipe into a healthier version. While healthy, we wanted to give these cookies a MAJOR nutrition boost by adding an ingredient you’d never even know was there…chickpeas!

If the idea of mixing beans into your cookie batter does not sound all that appetizing, don’t worry! You truly do not taste the beans at all.

Chickpeas in particular have a very mild flavor and happen to be a great bean for mixing into cookie batter. All you have to do is puree the chickpeas with the wet ingredients and then proceed like any other cookie by mixing the wet with the dry. Easy peasy way to add more plants in for the whole family!

More Desserts with Plant Foods

Desserts are an easy way to sneak in more plant foods. Here are some of our favorite recipes including fruit, veggies, or both!:

Recipe for Homemade Fudge: Recipe for homemade fudge is super EASY to make. Plus, it’s loaded with creamy, fudgy flavor, and nutrient-rich, whole dates! Nutrient-dense and loaded with health benefits.

Avocado Chocolate Pudding: This dairy free and sugar free CLEAN Avocado Chocolate Pudding recipe is sweetened with bananas, dates and stevia. Lots of plant foods in this easy recipe!

Black Bean Brownies: When it comes to baking conventional recipes like brownies it is often hard to push the envelope too far with too many “outside of the box” ideas. But trust me, black bean brownies are to die for.

Butternut Squash Muffins: Pillowy soft and sweet Butternut Squash Muffins are made with roasted butternut squash and deliciously healthy! Gluten and dairy free.

Ready to learn how to make these tasty Chickpea Cookies from home? Let’s get into the recipe!

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