These Gluten-Free Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies are soft and chewy, perfectly salty-sweet and are made using just 5 ingredients! And they're refined sugar free, grain-free, date-sweetened and oil-free too. Perfect for Christmas and gift-giving!
How to make this recipe
Scroll down to the bottom of the post for the full recipe.
- Place the dates, peanut butter, salt and vanilla in a food processor or blender.
- Whizz until completely smooth.
- Transfer into a glass mixing bowl and add the ground almonds.
Tip: Place the cookie dough in the fridge for at least 10 minutes for it to firm up slightly.
- Take a heaped tablespoon of the mixture and use your hands to form it into a little patty - don't worry, unlike traditional cookies, these ones won't spread out as they bake.
- Lay it out onto a rectangular baking tray lined with greased baking paper.
- Repeat until the rest of the batter is used up - you should be able to make 9 cookies.
Tip: I shaped the cookie dough mixture into cookies using my hands, but if you find the mixture too gooey to shape with your hands, you can use a cookie scoop instead, and use your hands or the back of a spoon to flatten them slightly.
- The criss-cross pattern on top of the cookies may look fancy, but it's super simple to do! All you need to do is to press the prongs of a fork on top of the cookies.
Tip: Using a wet fork makes it much easier as otherwise the fork might have problems getting unstuck from the cookies!
- Bake in the oven for 10 minutes - don’t worry if they’re quite soft when you take them out as they will firm up as they cool down.
How long do these keep for?
They keep in an airtight container for a few days.
Substitutions you can make
- You can replace the peanut butter with any other nut or seed butter: almond butter, cashew butter, sunflower seed butter etc.
- The ground almonds can be replaced with ground walnuts or ground sunflower seeds.
Ingredients you can add
- Chocolate chips.
- Desiccated coconut.
- Dried cranberries.
More vegan gluten-free cookies
- Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
- Blueberry Breakfast Cookies
- Chocolate Cookies
- Coconut Flour Cookies
- Pumpkin Cookies
- Snickerdoodles
- Oatmeal Cookies
- Sugar Cookies
- Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Carrot Cake Cookies
- Lemon Cookies
If you try out this recipe or anything else from my blog, I’d really love to hear any feedback! Please give it a rating, leave a comment, or tag a photo @rhiansrecipes #rhiansrecipes on Instagram! Thank you.
Watch how to make it
Gluten-Free Vegan Peanut Butter Cookies
Ingredients
- 90 g (½ cup) pitted dates soaked overnight in cold water or in hot water for 10 minutes
- Pinch salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 65 g (¼ cup) smooth peanut butter (or sub almond butter)
- 40 g (⅓ cup) ground almonds (almond meal) *
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit).
- Drain the soaked dates and place in a blender or food processor with the salt, vanilla and peanut butter.
- Whizz until completely smooth.
- Transfer into a bowl, add the ground almonds and mix well.
- Place the cookie dough in the fridge for at least 10 minutes for it to firm up slightly.
- Take a heaped tablespoon of the mixture and use your hands to form it into a small, circular, thick patty - don't worry, unlike traditional cookies, these ones won't spread out as they bake **.
- Lay it out onto a baking tray lined with baking paper (no need to grease it).
- Repeat until the rest of the batter is used up - you should be able to make 9 cookies.
- Take a wet fork and press the prongs of the fork across the top of a cookie then turn the fork around 180 degrees and press the fork prongs over the patty again to create a criss-cross pattern - a wet fork will make this easier.
- Repeat for the rest of the cookies.
- Bake in the oven for around 12 minutes - don’t worry if they’re quite soft when you take them out as they will firm up as they cool down.
- Leave to cool completely before storing in an airtight container - keeps in the fridge for a good few days.
Video
Notes
Disclosure: This posts contains affiliate links to Amazon. If you purchase any of these products, a small percentage will come to me with no extra cost to you! This income will go towards the running of this blog – thank you.
Jayne
Well, mine were a bit of a disaster! I did weigh everything out carefully, but the flavour of the dates dominated everything else, which is no mean feat where peanut butter is involved. I also struggled to blend the dates, they just adhered themselves to the edges of the blender and refused to move! I have a new oven which is perhaps a bit fierce, and they caught really quickly so mine were black on the bottom. I'm not sure I would make them again.
Anonymous
This is a general comment about all the recipes I have tried. LOVE THEM! So thankful I found you on the internet. I was beginning to lose hope in ever finding good/excellent tasting recipes that didn't have any foods I was sensitive to. Especially with my sweet tooth! Thank you, thank you!!!
Rhian Williams
Thank you so much, so glad you like my recipes!!
Ingrid
Epic failure in the blender. I recommend doubling the recipe If you don’t have a food processor or cutting the dates in tiny chunks and mixing from hand. I ended up just doubling the peanut butter based on other Poster’s comments, but had large chunks of dates because they wouldn’t blend. I didn’t have to put it in the fridge as they weren’t too sticky to handle. I baked the time indicated and they turned out really well.
Rhian Williams
Thank you so much for your feedback. I'm sorry to hear that, but glad it worked out in the end!