I was looking for a healthier alternative to my
nobake cookie recipe (over there on my other blog) and have been trolling the internet and planning out recipes in my head, but hadn't come up with a good alternive. I pinned a healthy flourless oatmeal cookie/bar recipe on Pinterest recently and have been dying to try it. First of all, it required a food processor - which I don't have. (P.S. I am insanely jealous of a friend of mine who bought herself a Kitchen Aid yesterday! It's next on my "list") But, where there's a will, there's a way. So, I rolled up my sleeves and got out all my "tools" (I do not have a 'professional' kitchen. So, my "tools" in this case were a ziplock freezer bag and an ice cream scoop. Whatever it takes, right?)
Here's what I came up with and I have to say, these are yummy!
First of all, I put about 2/3 cup of walnuts in a ziplock bag and beat the tar out of them with the ice cream scoop. I can't use it for ice cream, so at least it has a purpose!
I beat them until they were mostly small crumbles, but not completely "powder".
I put 2 cups of just regular old rolled oats in a bowl. **use gluten free oats if you are severely sensitive to gluten, due to cross contamination during processing.
Then, I dumped in my crushed walnuts and 1 cup of all natural peanut butter.
By all natural peanut butter, I mean the kind you have to stir the oil into and has 1 ingredient: peanuts. Smuckers is a fairly good brand (and all I had on hand).
Put 2/3 cup of raw honey into the mix. **I thought about using agave nectar, but since my peanut butter was all natural, so less solid than something like Peter Pan, I decided to go with honey. Honey is thicker than agave nectar and I want this to stick together in balls. If anybody experiments with agave nectar, with good results, let me know!
Then add 1 tsp vanilla extract.
I used a regular mixer and mixed well. It's pretty sticky at this point.
The only kind of chocolate I had on hand was cocoa, Baker's unsweetened bars and this pack of Baker's German Sweet Chocolate bars. I decided to go with this since I didn't use sugar and honey isn't as sweet as agave nectar.
These squares were small, so I used 6 of them.
I tried using a cheese grater at first, but that was turning my chocolate squares into powder. Baking squares are harder than, say, candy bar squares. So, I fell back on my tried and true way to mash things up and used my ziplock bag and the ice cream scoop. Again, beat the tar out of the squares to break them up, but not so much that it's powder.
I put my crushed chocolate squares in the oatmeal mix and used the regular blender/mixer to whip it all up.
Just grab some "dough" in your hands and make little balls (whatever size you want). These stuck together very well and didn't stick to my hands too much at all.
Bossman is at the tattoo shop this afternoon, so I'm teasing him with pictures of my new invention. If I don't eat them all before he gets home, we'll see what he thinks. As for me, I LOVE these! Extremely easy and took all of about 6 minutes (maybe 7 with taking pictures).
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