Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (Recipe)

I try not to bake on Fridays or Saturdays.

Why? Because if I bake Sunday – Thursday, Joe can take the leftovers with him to work the next day. But a Friday or Saturday? We’re much more likely to eat it all ourselves.

And that’s both unhealthy and not in keeping with a formidable lesson our parents taught us when we were young: Sharing is good.

I love almond butter so much. I was first introduced to it as an alternative-to-peanut-butter apple spread. After that initial taste, I ate approximately four dozen apple-and-almond-butter snacks over the following weeks. I couldn’t get enough.

Almond butter is also one of my favorite morning smoothie additions. I like to do a combination of almond butter and almond extract, along with frozen cherries, almond milk, and chocolate protein powder. I call it the cherry amaretto smoothie. So yum.

I originally found this cookie recipe in an old issue of Clean Eating magazine; it’s since been published in one of their cookbooks and is available online as well. I tweaked it a bit this time around because I found that the first few times I made them, the cookies were a little too wet for my liking. I decided to add in some almond meal to see what would happen.

I love how they turned out: crisp and buttery. Almond butter adds a delicious depth to the cookies, and they’re not overly sweet (I cut down on the amount of sugar the original recipe called for as well).

I really need to remember to make these on a Sunday.

Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Makes 30

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsalted almond butter

• 1 cup almond meal

• 1 egg

• ½ cup sugar

• ½ tsp baking soda

• Pinch salt

• About ½ cup bittersweet chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli)

 Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Combine everything except the chocolate chips in a bowl. Use either your fingers or a spoon to form the dough into balls a little smaller than a tablespoon in size.

3. Place the balls an inch or two apart on a parchment-lined baking sheet.

4. Gently press three or four chocolate chips into each ball, slightly flattening the balls.

5. Bake for 10 – 12 minutes. The cookies should look slightly underdone, just barely brown at the edges.

6. Cool for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.

7. Enjoy with a nice cool glass of almond milk (you know, to keep to the theme).

8. Pack up leftover cookies to take into work with you tomorrow. (Just do it, you’ll thank me later.)