I thought I already posted this. I can’t believe I didn’t. I’ve made this recipe three times. Yes. Three times. I hardly ever make desserts more than once let alone three times. So yes, they are that good!
I found this recipe through Pinterest. I love Pinterest, by the way. Love, love, love it! I keep finding all of these wonderful recipes. (Along with fitness, fashion and decoration inspiration.) The original recipe isn’t vegan, but it easily converted to vegan. All I had to do was sub out the egg for a flax egg. I used golden flax so it matched the peanut butter, and it was totally undetectable. Plus, without the egg, you can worrilessly lick the spoon and bowl 
Aside from replacing the egg with a flax egg, I also reduced the liquid sugar to 1/4 cup of maple syrup. With the chocolate chips, the cookies are plenty sweet enough.
The first time I made these cookies, my batch only made nine cookies. The recipe says it makes 24, which I thought was weird. Until I pulled the cookies out of the oven. Surprisingly, they expand! The cookies from my first batch were total peanut butter fest. Wowza! Talk about rich. So, the second time I made them, I used my cookie scoop (love my Christmas gift from Mr. M!) for the first time and made 20 much smaller cookies. Ah…much better. I also shared some of this batch with a friend, who raved about them!
Because I had such success with the first two batches, I tried this recipe again, but switched up the nut butter and added some walnuts (because the friend I made them for loves walnuts in chocolate chip cookies). I had a jar of TJ’s sunflower seed butter hanging out in the fridge annoying me (I didn’t care for it – weird), and there was about a cup left, which was prefect. Again, I used golden flax for a flax egg and 1/4 c maple syrup, which was plenty sweet. I ended up using about 1/2 c of toasted walnuts (I spread them out on the parchment paper covered cookie sheet and toasted them while the oven was warming – worked perfectly) and a heaping 1/2 c of chocolate chips since this batch was going to someone used to SAD cookies. The resulting cookies was delicious!
I didn’t think I’d like these cookies because I hate nuts in cookies, and I wasn’t a big fan of the sunflower seed butter in its natural state. But I thought wrong. I had to taste at least a bite of one to make sure they were edible, and I ended up eating two. Ha ha!
Another surprise about these cookies (besides their deliciousness) was the inside – it’s black! Apparently sunflower seed butter turns black when it’s heated?! Or maybe it was from some sort of reaction to the flax?? Whatever the reason, it was a little weird-looking, but it didn’t deter my friend from digging into the cookies, so no biggie.
The thing I love the most about these cookies is that they’re grain free. I’ve been trying more grain-free recipes, and I’m really enjoying them. And, being grain free, these cookies are also naturally gluten-free (if your flax isn’t cross-contaminated). Perfect!
