Protein Coconut Almond Butter Cookies

These Protein Coconut Almond Butter Cookies are incredibly easy to make and taste so freaking good. Like, you may need to hide them, because it’s very easy to “accidentally” eat the whole batch over the course of an afternoon. I’m guessing 🙂

I wouldn’t consider these “high” protein but they definitely have more protein than normal cookies, but they don’t taste like it. I typically don’t use protein powder in my cooking unless I can do it in such a way that you can’t detect it, because I really don’t like protein powder for the most part. In these cookies, you can’t taste it at all! The texture of these cookies is chewy, with a bit of crispy edges!

Ingredients

• Sugar – I know a lot of people don’t like using sugar, but if I’m going to make desserts, I’m usually going to use sugar. You could probably swap this out for date sugar though if you want.
• Almond Protein Powder – I really like PB2’s Performance Almond Protein Powder (with Madagascar Vanilla) – it tastes really good, even just on its own, and has pretty great macros! I’ve only been able to find this online, though it may be in better grocery stores than mine.
• Coconut Almond Butter – I really like the brand MaraNatha. If you use a regular almond butter (that doesn’t have coconut flavor), and want these cookies to taste very coconut-y, just add a little extra coconut extract to make up for it!
• Vanilla Protein Powder – I used Orgain Vanilla, as the flavor is pretty mild. You can use whatever brand you like best; would not recommend a flavorless one though, as we are getting some of our sweetness from the protein powder. I usually don’t use protein powder in my recipes, but you can’t tell there is protein powder in this because we don’t use a ton.
• Flour – if you are gluten-free, you should be able to swap this for a gluten-free option.
• Vanilla and Coconut Extract – I think these are a must!
• Ground Flax and Water – this is ground flax seed. You should be able to find this at any grocery store. It’s a really great egg replacement in vegan baking. You just mix it with water, let it sit and wait for it to turn weird and gooey!
• Salt, Baking Powder, and Baking Soda – um, we’re baking, so we need these 🙂

Instructions

• In a small bowl, mix together 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed and 6 tablespoons of water. This is a pretty normal and cheap egg replacement in vegan baking. We will set this to the side and let it sit for at least 5 minutes. It should end up very gooey and not watery. We shall call this flax goo from here.
• In a medium bowl, mix the almond butter spread, flax goo, vanilla extract, coconut extract and sugar together.
• In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, almond powder, protein powder, salt, baking soda, and baking powder together. You could also just add these straight to the wet ingredients but the dough gets pretty intense and it would be difficult to make sure the baking soda, baking powder and salt were evenly mixed throughout (since they are added in such small quantities).
• Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix well. This will be a very dense dough, similar to sugar cookie dough and can be kind of difficult to mix. You could also use a stand or hand mixer here.
• Put the dough in the fridge to chill for about 20 – 30 minutes.
• While you’re waiting on the dough to chill, do the opposite, and pre-heat oven to 350 F (177 C).
• Once the dough is chilled, use a 2 tbsp scooper (so you get the size right). This should give you 16 cookies.
• Roll each into a ball and toss in powdered sugar.
• Lay the dough balls on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet, with pretty decent spacing because they do expand.

• Press a fork into each ball twice, forming an X (90 degrees from one another).
• Bake for 8 – 10 minutes. They will come out of the oven very soft.

• Never fear, they will firm after 5 – 10 minutes of cooling. They end up very chewy!

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Flax goo is so cool