Chickpea Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies: These Have No Business Being This Good

I saw chickpea peanut butter chocolate chip cookies on Instagram and immediately had questions.

First of all, chickpeas? In a cookie?

Second, I eat gluten-free, so I'm always interested when I see a cookie recipe that doesn't require regular flour—or some complicated combination of six gluten-free flours that costs $47 and requires me to dirty every measuring cup I own.

So I decided to try them.

This is also when I learned that chickpeas and garbanzo beans are the exact same thing. Apparently I have made it 50 years on this earth without needing that information. 😂

I picked an 8-pack of 15-ounce cans of garbanzo beans from Costco, peanut butter in the pantry and most of the other ingredients. Dairy-free chocolate chips would have been perfect, too.

I did not have those.

What I did have was an old bag of regular chocolate chips in the pantry that had started changing color.

Were they past their prime? Perhaps.

Did that stop me? Absolutely not.

They were chocolate. We carried on.

Chickpea Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

The Actual Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas/garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed very well

• ½ cup creamy peanut butter

• ⅓ cup maple syrup

• 2 teaspoons vanilla

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

• ¼ teaspoon salt

• ½ cup chocolate chips — dairy-free if you want to keep the cookies dairy-free

• Optional: 1–2 tablespoons almond flour or gluten-free oat flour if the batter seems too soft

Turns out I did NOT need two cookie sheets. These things weren't going anywhere.

Directions

Heat your oven to 350°F.

Add the chickpeas, peanut butter, maple syrup, vanilla, baking soda and salt to a food processor or blender. I used my Ninja, and it worked perfectly.

Blend until completely smooth. You don't want little chunks of garbanzo beans hanging around reminding everyone what's actually in their cookie.

Stir in the chocolate chips.

Scoop the dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and flatten the cookies slightly before baking. They do not spread like regular cookies, which I learned after staring through the oven door waiting for something to happen.

Bake for approximately 10–13 minutes. Let them sit on the baking sheet for about 10 minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack.

And Here's What I Actually Did...

I doubled the recipe and used two 15-ounce cans of chickpeas.

Then I got out my Ninja.

And apparently decided measuring cups were simply too much work.

I eyeballed the peanut butter.

Eyeballed the maple syrup.

Eyeballed the vanilla.

Eyeballed the salt.

And dumped in what can only be described as a ton of chocolate chips, while simultaneously eating enough chocolate chips that there's no possible way to reconstruct how many actually went into the cookies.

I DID measure the baking soda.

I have standards.

Mostly, though, I had fewer dishes to wash. 😂

The One Thing I'd Do Differently

I didn't flatten mine before putting them into the oven because I wasn't sure how much they'd spread.

Answer: not at all.

After 10 minutes, I pulled them out, pressed them down gently with my fingers, and put them back into the oven for another 3 minutes.

Then I let them sit on the cookie sheet for 10 minutes, moved them to a cooling rack and let them cool completely before putting them in the refrigerator.

And that refrigerator part?

DO IT.

I ate one warm and thought it was really good.

Cold from the fridge = sooooooo good! Soft, moist and almost like peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough.

I ate one cold from the refrigerator the next morning—for breakfast, because apparently chickpeas make cookies breakfast food—and thought it was even better.

They're soft, moist and dense, almost like eating peanut butter chocolate-chip cookie dough.

But Can You Taste the Chickpeas?

NO.

That was my biggest concern. I did not want a peanut-butter-flavored hummus cookie.

These don't taste like beans.

The peanut butter, maple syrup, vanilla and chocolate completely take over, and blending the chickpeas until they're really smooth gives the cookies this surprisingly rich, soft texture.

And the batter was SO DARN GOOD!

Seriously. I could have eaten it with a spoon and skipped the oven entirely.

Are They Healthy?

I'm not going to slap the word healthy on a cookie because it contains a chickpea. There's still peanut butter, maple syrup and—as prepared in my kitchen—an irresponsible quantity of chocolate chips. 😂

But they're naturally gluten-free, there's no traditional flour, and the chickpeas and peanut butter bring some protein and fiber to the party.

If you use dairy-free chocolate chips, they're also easy to make dairy-free.

I didn't.

I used my elderly, discoloring pantry chocolate chips and lived to tell the tale.

Would I Make Them Again?

Absolutely.

For a gluten-free cookie, these were shockingly good. Actually, forget the qualifier. They were just really good cookies.

Next time I'll probably flatten them before baking... Maybe.

And maybe I'll actually measure the ingredients.

Maybe.

I make no promises about the chocolate chips. 😂