Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

These cookies have a lot going for them. For starters, they are absolutely delicious and everything that a chocolate chip cookie should be: chewy around the edges, soft in the middle, and full of rich chocolate and caramel-like flavors.

As you can see here, my last batch puffed up quite a bit in the middle. My other batches spread out more during baking like traditional Tollhouse cookies. The cookies seem to spread out the most when you plop the just-mixed dough onto the baking sheet and bake right away. They spread out a little less if you give the coconut flour a few minutes to soak up some extra moisture, and they spread out the least if you let the dough chill in the refrigerator for ten or more minutes before baking.

Naturally sweetened, gluten-free chocolate chip cookies made with almond meal and coconut flour. These cookies remind me of classic Tollhouse cookies, but much more healthy and easy to make—only one bowl required! Since this recipe is egg free, it is easily made vegan by substituting coconut oil for butter and using maple syrup instead of honey.

Yields 24 small cookies.

Ingredients

• ¾ cup almond flour or almond meal, very firmly packed (about 3 ounces or 100 grams)
• ¼ cup coconut flour, very firmly packed (about 1½ ounces or 43 grams)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon fine grain sea salt
• Dash cinnamon (optional)
• ½ cup butter or coconut oil, melted
• ½ cup real maple syrup (preferably grade B) or honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 6 ounces dark chocolate, chopped, or 1 cup chocolate chips

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or use a silicone mat.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Pour in the melted butter (or melted coconut oil), maple syrup (or honey) and vanilla extract, and mix thoroughly. Stir in the chocolate.

Let the dough rest for 5 minutes in the refrigerator so the coconut flour can absorb some of the excess moisture (or let the dough chill in the fridge for 10+ minutes if you want fat cookies, like those shown here). Scoop dough, one tablespoon at a time, in mounds onto the baking sheet, leaving a couple inches around each cookie.

Bake for about 11 minutes, until golden brown. Let them cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes, then slide the parchment paper onto a cooling rack to finish cooling. The cookies will be fragile when they are warm but will firm up as they cool.

Notes

These cookies are gluten free, thanks to a simple combination of two flours (almond and coconut flours). They’re naturally sweetened with maple syrup, which lends a brown sugar-like sweetness. They’re eggless, too, which means that the recipe is easily vegan. These cookies are about as healthy as cookies can be.

The original recipe calls for almond flour, but you can use almond meal from Trader Joe’s and they will turn out great.  Most stores now carry coconut flour in their baking section.  Bob's Red Mill is very popular and priced pretty good.  You can always check out Amazon.com too.  Coconut flour is essential to this recipe because its high fiber content soaks up the extra moisture from the liquid sweetener, ensuring that the cookies don’t spread out too much on the pan (more on that later).

The cookies taste fantastic whether you use maple syrup or honey, but I think maple syrup tastes more like brown sugar and yields a more traditionally flavored cookie. I also tried using coconut oil instead of butter, which, as you might expect, produced a cookie with a more pronounced coconut flavor. I’m partial to the butter version. I’m not quite sure why, but the coconut oil cookies were thinner and seemed ever-so-slightly brittle the next day. Lastly, I chose to chop up dark chocolate instead of using chocolate chips, so maybe I shouldn’t call these chocolate chip cookies after all. Whether you choose chips or chunks or chop your own chocolate, just make sure it’s good quality.

Make it dairy free/vegan: Just use the coconut oil instead of the butter (to make it dairy free) and choose maple syrup as your natural sweetener instead of the honey (to make it vegan).

Source:  Cookie and Kate, Recipe adapted from Gluten Free Fix.