Quinoa Cookies with Maple Syrup
To start the year off right, I decided to make a cookie on the healthier side of things with nuts, dried fruit and quinoa - an ingredient that you don’t usually see in baking recipes. This recipe comes from Joshua McFadden’s Grains for Every Season cookbook, which does an amazing job of highlighting the versatility of various grains. This is a pretty straightforward recipe and McFadden had already incorporated a natural sweetener - maple syrup - so I didn’t have to make any adaptations for that (he does say you can use granulated sugar or half sugar and half maple syrup but we’re going to stick with 100% maple syrup of course).
One thing to note is that you’ll want to make sure you are buying and using coconut butter - not coconut oil - for this recipe. Coconut butter is a product of the coconut flesh, whereas coconut oil is just the oil that’s extracted from the coconut.
Enjoy!
Ingredients
90 grams (1/2 cup) uncooked quinoa
1 large egg
160 grams (1 cup) coconut butter
120 ml (1/2 cup) maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
175 grams (1 and 1/2 cups) nuts, lightly toasted and roughly chopped
120 g (1 cup) dried fruit (cranberries, strawberries, cherries. etc.)
Directions
Preheat your oven to 350 F.
Spread the quinoa on half of a sheet pan and spread your nuts on the other half and bake for about 10 minutes, until toasted and nutty smelling. Let cool.
Combine the egg, coconut butter, maple syrup, salt, and baking soda in a food processor and pulse until fully combined. Place this mixture in a bowl and fold in the nuts, dried fruit, and toasted quinoa. [If you don’t want to chop your nuts by hand, you could place the nuts in the food processor either before this step or after you have removed the mixture and pulse until roughly chopped]
Scoop the cookie dough onto lined sheet pans and press down on each cookie to slightly flatten it. Bake for about 12-14 minutes, until the cookies are starting to turn golden on the edges. Let them cool on the sheet pan for a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack (otherwise they might fall apart).
