Oh. Holy. Moly. You know that feeling where you just know you’ve nailed a recipe? Well, this is one for the books guys. Recently, my lovely friend and fellow blogger Niamh (Shake The Sugar is her fabulous site, have a peek!) and I decided it was high time we put our friendship and mutual love of healthy delicious food to good use – by collaborating on a tasty new recipe for you guys! You all probably know by now that I’m perhaps a little bit obsessed with chickpeas as an ingredient – I love how versatile they are, as well as how they are TOTAL nutritional powerhouses, packed full of plant protein and fibre. One of the most tried recipes on my blog by you guys, and one of my own personal favourites, is my Chocolate Chickpea Power Bars, and these cookies are, dare I say it, just as damn delicious and nutritious at that! I really can’t wait for you all to try them – I made a big batch before starting a week of busy shifts recently, and it made me so happy to have one wrapped up in my snack bag ready to dunk into a cuppa tea on a break. I’ve used a tasty dose of hemp protein in this recipe, with one of my favourite brands Linwoods, but I’ve included a note below for substitutions if you want to use your own personal favourite protein powder, or you can omit it entirely and just try subbing extra oat flour or use ground almonds in its place! Now… let’s BAKE! You can also find the recipe on Niamh’s website – via the link here!

Recipe (Makes 10-12 cookies – size them how you want to!)

Ingredients

• 1 tsp cacao butter or coconut oil
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp baking soda or 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tbsp cacao powder
• 2 tbsp whole chia seeds
• 1 banana
• 50g hemp protein powder (I use the Linwoods blend)
• 50g oats, blended into flour
• 1 400g tin of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• 100ml of milk (I use Alpro plant milks)
• 1 handful of raw cashews, loosely chopped
• 50g of good quality (70% or above people!) dark chocolate, broken into chips
• Note: If you don’t have hemp protein powder, feel free to substitute with your own protein powder of choosing, or just use extra oat flour, or try ground almonds!

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 175C (fan oven), and line a baking tray (you may need two) with greaseproof paper, or tinfoil greased with a little olive oil.
2. Take a large mixing bowl, and add your dry ingredients to it – oat flour, hemp protein powder, chia seeds, chopped nuts, cacao powder, baking soda and cinnamon. Leave the chocolate chips aside for now.
3. Take a power blender or food processor (I use my Nutribullet), and add the chickpeas, milk, cacao butter or coconut oil and banana. Blitz it all up.
4. Pour the wet blended mixture into the centre of the dry ingredients in the bowl.
5. Stir it all up until you have a batter, and then fold in the chocolate chips.
6. Using a medium sized spoon, scoop out small fist size amounts of the batter onto the baking tray – you should get 10-12 cookies from this recipe for a medium size cookie – you could make them smaller for more bite size snacks if you want!
7. Bake in the oven for 30-35 minutes. I checked mine at 30 and found them a little soft still – so I gave them an extra 5-7 minutes and they crisped up nicely!
8. Allow to cool for about 20 minutes before tucking in! You can freeze these also if you want to save them for snacks for a week ahead. Otherwise they should keep in a sealed tupperware for up to 5 days!

Enjoy gang! This is pretty much tied with my previous favourite snack recipe on my blog – my Chocolate Chickpea Power Bars! Tag me if you try these out, I would love to hear if you love these as much as I do and see your tasty creations – @theirishbalance on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook!

Ciara 🙂 x