in a word, yum! these almond butter chocolate chip cookies are kind of ridiculously good. i say ridiculously because they don’t have any refined sugar (well, depending on what kind of chocolate chips you buy) nor do they have any butter or other things that make traditional cookies good. they don’t even have any flour! they’d basically be figments of your tastebuds’ imagination if it weren’t for dates and almond butter. aaaaand plenty of chocolate chips.
yes, you read that right: they little balls of deliciousness have just 6 ingredients. dates, almond butter, an egg, some baking soda and vanilla, and chocolate chips. that’s it. and did i mention how good they taste? it’s really kind of silly how good they are, given how simple and relatively healthy they are.
these cookies are a good demonstration of how 1 + 1 can = 3. i had seen recipes for simple almond butter cookies and i had seen recipes where dates were used in place of sugar so i decided to see if i could combine the two concepts and the answer is most definitely yes!
i will say, the texture is a little bit crumbly, kind of like how some peanut butter cookies are crumbly, which makes sense, given that these have a similar formula of ingredients (but are much easier to make and much yummier!). the other thing that i noticed, which you can see in the picture below, is that depending on how long the dough rests in the fridge, the cookies will come out a different color.
the darker cookies were made from dough that had been resting in the fridge for about 5 days (i don’t know how i possibly left the dough alone for so long!) whereas the lighter colored ones were baked right when i made the dough. i slightly preferred the taste of the darker ones as i thought they had a bit more caramel flavor but the difference is subtle and given that cookies NOW are almost always preferable to cookies in the future, i probably wouldn’t delay gratification for 5 days just to let the dough rest. unless i made two batches at once, one for now and one for later…
almond butter chocolate chip cookies
Save to BigOven 
Ingredients
- 8 1/4 oz. (233 g. / 1 cup) smooth natural almond butter
- 5 oz. (139 g. / 1 cup) pitted dates (pitted before weighing)
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 3 oz. (85 g. / 1/2 cup) chocolate chips (check label for dairy/gluten/sugar if you’re concerned about those)
Instructions
- preheat the oven to 350° F. line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
- put everything except the chocolate chips in the food processor and run it for 60 – 90 seconds, stopping once or twice to scrape the sides of the bowl and especially the bottom edge of the bowl. you want the dates to be totally chopped up and for the dough to be well combined but don’t process it to the point that it turns into a thick gloop.
- put the dough in a medium bowl (it’s worth washing the extra dish to not try to do this in the processor bowl with the gigantic blade at the bottom… trust me). add the chocolate chips and stir to combine.
- use a 1/4 cup measuring cup as a scoop to create roughly golf ball sized balls of dough. roll the dough between your hands to pack into balls – don’t compact them too tightly, but the dough is prone to crumbling so roll them enough that they hold together.
- place the balls of dough on the cookie sheet and flatten slightly. the cookies don’t appreciably expand or flatten when they bake so the shape they go in the oven is pretty similar to the shape they come out.
- bake the cookies for 9 – 10 minutes, taking care not to burn the bottoms (since the dough is already dark, it’s hard to see if the cookies are getting burned dark). cool on the sheet for 5 minutes then use a spatula to transfer carefully to a rack to cool completely.
Yes, please!
🙂 i’m a fan and i think you’ll like them too!
Fantastic!! And I think I know at least one person for whom this will be even more fantastic!
yes, though i will say, none of my recipe testers were gluten free, dairy free people and they all liked the cookies too, which is promising.