These Keto Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies Are A Godsend | 3 Ingredients

Keto vegan peanut butter cookies

Following a low-carb plant based diet is challenging enough, but for those of us who have the occasional craving for sweets it can be downright torture sometimes. If you’re looking for a low-carb vegan snack that tastes great and is easy to make, these keto vegan peanut butter cookies are an absolute game changer. They only contain 3 ingredients, they’re easy to prepare, and they shouldn’t knock you out of ketosis when eaten in moderation.

The problem with restricting carbohydrates is that some of the best tasting sweet snacks tend to be high in simple carbohydrates like sugar. This is something I struggle with quite often because following a low carb diet plan means having to deprive myself of satisfying my sweet tooth. However, after doing a little digging around over the weekend, I came across a simple recipe for some keto vegan peanut butter cookies that only uses three ingredients — creamy natural peanut butter, ground chia seeds, and any kind of granulated calorie-free sweetener.

Keto Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies

Fortunately these are items that I already had in my house, so I gathered them in my kitchen and got to work.

To be honest, I didn’t have very high expectations going in. However, the cookie dough came together surprisingly well, and although there’s a couple of things I’ll do differently next time I make them, I was pleasantly surprised by how well these cookies came out.

Ingredients

These keto vegan peanut butter cookies require the following ingredients…

Peanut butter cookies ingredients

  • 1 cup of natural creamy peanut butter: It’s important to go with the natural variation because it has that gooey, oily consistency that lends itself to baking cookies. I’m not so sure this recipe would work as well (or if at all) with regular peanut butter.
  • 4 tablespoons of ground chia seeds: The chia seeds are meant to replace eggs by acting as a binding agent. They must be ground up first (I used my Ninja blender to do this. You can also use a coffee grinder.) The recipe that I followed said you don’t need to mix them with water to make that gelatinous egg substitute you would normally make as an egg substitute, so I didn’t.
  • 2/3 cup of granulated artificial sweetener: Finally, you’re going to need something to give your cookies a sweet taste. Normally you would use sugar here, but we’re trying to keep this low carb, so we’ll have to go with a sugar free alternative. I went with Stevia.

Baking Instructions

The first thing you’ll want to do is preheat your oven to 350 F while you’re preparing everything else so that you’re ready to hit the ground running once your cookies are ready to bake.

Next, you can go ahead and dump your ingredients into a large bowl.

Ingredients in a bowl

Mix them all together with a large spoon until it has a wet, sand-like consistency.

Mixed ingredients

Now it’s time to roll your sleeves up and dig in with your hands. Mix and mash the ingredients until you have a nice, round, smooth ball of peanut butter cookie dough.

Ball of dough

Now it’s time to start breaking up the dough into individual cookies. To make sure that each cookie is roughly the same size, what I did was cut the ball of cookie dough in half 4 times. This resulted in 16 evenly sized pieces of dough that you can roll into little balls and place on your baking sheet.

Rolled balls of dough

Grab a fork and press them down in a crisscross pattern to give them a flat, cookie-like shape, then slide them into the oven.

The recipe I followed called for 10-12 minutes of baking time at 350 F, but I personally found that to not be enough time. Mine were ready around the 20 minute mark, but your results may vary so be sure to keep an eye on them.

Here’s how the finished keto vegan peanut butter cookies came out…

Finished cookies

They had rich peanut-buttery taste and a heavy cake-like consistency. An they tasted even better the next day after they sat in the refrigerator for a night. Definitely not bad for a low-carb dessert!

Cookie texture

Final Thoughts

Although this was my first time making these peanut butter cookies, I was quite impressed with how well they came out, and even more impressed with how good they taste. However, there is room for improvement.

As I mentioned earlier, the original recipe calls for plain ground chia seeds without soaking them in water to make a gelatinous egg substitute. I feel like this was a mistake because the cookies did fall apart in my hands with relative ease.  Next time I make these cookies I plan to soak the chia seeds in water to make a proper egg substitute and see if that works. Check out the following video for how to make a chia egg substitute if you aren’t already aware of this method.

I feel like the cookies would’ve come out much better if I had done this, but even then it’s just a minor downside. What matters most is the taste, and the taste is a thumbs up from me.

Nutrition

Finally, we’ll wrap this post up by outlining the nutrition info of these cookies so you can log them into your food records accordingly. As I mentioned earlier, I cut the dough in half 4 times to make 16 cookies. The following nutrition information is based on the assumption that you’ll do the same. A serving size represents 1 cookie, or 1/16th of the cookie dough.

 

Serving size: 1 cookie (or 1/16th of the dough)
Calories 216
Total Fat 11 grams
Saturated Fat 2
Cholesterol 0 mg
Sodium 40 mg
Total Carbohydrates 8 grams
Fiber 4 grams
Sugar 2 grams
Protein 9 grams

As you can see, these cookies on have 8 grams of carbohydrates each, and when you subtract the fiber you’re left with a paltry 4 grams of net carbs per cookie! Needless to say, these keto vegan peanut butter cookies are an excellent snack for those of you who may be following a low-carb diet. In fact, they could even be compatible with a ketogenic diet! Imagine a world where you can eat cookies that taste delicious and remain in a state of ketosis. Now welcome to your reality.

PlantBasedFAQs.com

This post was contributed by a member of the PBF writing staff. PlantBasedFAQs.com is an online publication for learning about plant-based food and nutrition.

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