Quinoa Cookies Recipe
- Details
- June 22
The idea of quinoa cookies has been on my mind for a while now. I packed lots of good stuff into these ones - quinoa, tahini, flax, brown rice flour, cinnamon - to show you it is possible to make cookies into healthy vegan recipes.
Quinoa is the poster child for a plant-based food with all of the essential amino acids (aka complete protein), and it has lots of other benefits, too.
It's high in folate, magnesium, phosphorus and manganese. The cool thing about whole foods, like quinoa, is that they give your body so much overall benefit - not just the individual nutrients.
Tahini is ground sesame seeds, so very high in calcium, but also fiber. Flax adds more great fiber, plus omega-3 fatty acids. Cinnamon helps balance blood sugar levels, and encourages your digestive system to break down and absorb these yummy cookies.
So these are good cookies for everyone in this house: a mom who's breastfeeding (so baby gets the nutrients indirectly), an active 3-year-old boy, a grandma who's post-menopause, an on-the-go corporate lawyer, a husband who works out a lot, and a nutritionist who just likes a good healthy cookie with her tea :)
I went in experimental-style - with no recipe. This is how I usually make meals, and it works with cookies too. Learning to experiment with a recipe or a dish takes some time and practice (and maybe my online cooking classes), but is so worth it because you can make something so much faster.
Because quinoa is soft and I used some non-dairy milk, these cookies are a soft muffin-top-like texture. Next time, I might try experimenting to get a drier, more crunchy-cookie texture.
Now, as promised, my nephew was allowed a cookie after dinner to give you a review. I was downstairs at the time, and when his mom told him I'd made them, he ran down and said to me, 'This cookie is so good! You made it for me. It tastes good.' No lie, that's a direct quote. Gotta love 3-year-old sentence structure.
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Time from start to eating: 35 minutes
Makes 16 cookies
Quinoa Cookies Ingredients
- 1/2 cup quinoa (dry measure)
- 1/3 cup tahini
- 1/4 cup maple syrup
- 1/4 cup non-dairy milk
- 1/4 cup ground flax seeds
- 1-2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1 1/2 cups brown rice flour
- 1/2 cup raisins
- 1/4 cup non-dairy chocolate chips (optional)
Quinoa Cookies Directions
- Cook the quinoa in 1 cup water with a pinch of salt, bringing it to a boil then turning down to low to simmer for 15 minutes.
- Mix together the tahini, maple syrup and non-dairy milk in a bowl until smooth. Stir in the flax, cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg and a pinch of salt.
- Once the quinoa is cooked, stir it in with the wet ingredients. Then mix in the brown rice flour, using more or less to get the right cookie dough texture.
- Fold in the raisins and/or chocolate chips. I added raisins to the whole batch, but only added chocolate chips to half the batch. If you use chocolate chips for the whole batch, you may want to use a 1/2 cup.
- Put spoonfuls of batter on a lined or greased cookie sheet. Put in the oven at 350 degrees F, for about 20 minutes.
I hope you like my quinoa cookies as much as my nephew does, and have fun trying out some more of my healthy vegan recipes.
