Vegan No Bake Cookies

I have officially attempted a vegan recipe (one of my new co-workers is vegan and I was taking treats for a birthday... I wanted to see if I could do it!). We'll have to see what they think about them tomorrow... Introducing no bake cookies to the summer series because... you don't have to turn on the oven to make them.

Anyway! I went searching and found this blog and recipe.

Frosty No Bake Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies (80 cals each)
by Angela Liddon (from Oh She Glows)
Makes about 7 cookies

Ingredients:

1/2 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup non-dairy chocolate chips
1 large banana
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 tbsp chia seeds
1 tbsp buckwheat groats (optional)
1 tsp cocoa powder
Sweetener, if preferred

Instructions:
In a microwave safe bowl, melt the chocolate chips for about 60 seconds being careful not to burn. Remove from microwave and stir so the rest of the chips melt.

Roughly chop the banana and mash it into the melted chips with a fork.

Stir in the rest of the ingredients into the chocolate & banana and stir very well until all oats are coated with chocolate.

Line a plate with parchment and drop about 7 cookies onto it. Alternatively, you can use muffin liners. Freeze for about 1 hour or until firm. Cookies will firm up, but they won’t become solid and will remain chewy. Leave in the freezer for a quick chocolate fix any time of the day! Makes 7 small cookies.

 
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I did not add buckwheat oats or sweetener. I saw later that it only made 7 small cookies, and had bought enough rolled oats to double the recipe, so I did... When I dropped the cookies, I ended up with 12 cookies... so I didn't do it quite right, but it's close enough. Below is the nutritional information provided on the blog.

Update: These are tasty cookies. However, if you do not like banana, you will most likely not like them. I could definitely taste the banana, but I think banana and chocolate are fabulous together! I kept them in the freezer at first, and then in the refrigerator. In my opinion, they're better out of the freezer as they are very soft and messy out of the refrigerator. Here's a picture I took of the cookies after they were hardened... the little bits of white you see are frost - they reacted like that when I took them outside (into the heat) to get some good light. Oh well!

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Per Cookie (makes 7) 80 kcals 3 grams fat (1 gram sat) 10 grams carbs 2 grams fibre 5 grams sugar 2 grams protein

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A note about Chia Seeds...

First of all, they are somewhat difficult to find... and then once I found them, I couldn't find a small container of them. There's 16oz (45 Tablespoons) in this container. Ugh. All I needed was a Tablespoon! Now I have a pound of these seeds... The good thing is that when I looked them up (before I went to buy them), I learned that they're great for your nutrition - great source of fiber, calcium, omega-3... And you can add them to pretty much anything. The funny part about it is that this container says that you can eat them right out of the container... When I read that to the man from the store who was trying to help me find a smaller container, he looked at me and said yeah... I don't think you'd want to do that... with a grossed out look on his face. I agreed.

Anyway, you should look up the nutritional information on these things, and be ready to spend $10-20 on a canister of the seeds if you want to buy them. I think they'll last a while, so it's probably not a ridiculous amount, I just didn't expect to spend that much when I went in. This canister was $5 less than the other same-sized canister of a different brand.