Simple Warm and Gooey Protein Peanut Oatmeal Cookies

These are one of my favourite healthy, high protein snacks. They hit that sweet craving so well and are balanced with the bitterness of the dark chocolate. Due to the extra peanut protein, these cookies have such a rich peanut flavour, but with the maple syrup it mellows out this intense flavour a bit. Read through the recipe to find some tips, tricks and substitutions!

To those who are vegans, this recipe can easily be altered. I recommend using a flax-egg, chia-egg or just using a 1/4 cup of dairy-free milk in replacement of the egg. They may not have the same texture as making the cookies with egg, but they will still taste just as delicious!

Alternatively, if you wanted to use just egg whites rather than a whole egg, you can use a 1/4 cup of egg whites instead of the egg.

If you do not have steel cut, or rolled oats to hand, you can use porridge oats. You may find that the porridge oats can soak up the wet ingredients a little more than the whole rolled oats. If the batter becomes too thick and unmanageable, I recommend adding a couple tablespoons of dairy free milk to the batter. This will loosen it up a little, whilst not compromising the taste or end-result texture. But ensure not to overdo it on the milk as you want this to be a relatively firm batter.

Additional ideas for your peanut butter cookies:

Drizzle of peanut butter on the top
Melted chocolate drizzle over the top
Chopped peanuts into the batter
Served with a scoop of dairy-free ice-cream or sorbet (check out my sorbet recipe here)
Crumbled over a yoghurt bowl (check out my vanilla protein or chocolate orange yoghurt bowls)
Served with and dipped into a cup of tea
A dusting of icing sugar

Here you can see that the batter is quite thick. You want the dough to hold its shape because they are unlikely to spread in the oven whilst baking due to the rolled oats. Due to the use of peanut butter in the batter, this will make the consistency quite stiff. This also helps the cookies to have that fudgy centre, that makes a great oatmeal cookie. Toasted oats on the exterior will give our cookies that delicious, crunchy outside which also helps the cookies to keep their shape once baked.

The peanut protein I used helps to boost the peanut flavour, and also increase the protein content, helping these cookies become a hearty snack to keep you full for a prolonged period of time. I love adding protein to my bakes as they make the goods more satiating and filling. If you do not have peanut protein powder (which I highly recommend), you can use normal peanut powder or just omit this completely. You can instead add an extra 2 tbsp of peanut butter to get more peanut flavour, or just ignore the peanut protein powder ingredient completely.

Before placing your cookies into the oven, you want to mould them into the size and shape that you exactly want. This is because these cookies will more or less stay the same shape throughout the baking process. If you scoop them with an ice-cream scoop and just put them into the oven like that, you will end up with domed cookies and can also run the risk of having a raw, uncooked centre despite the outside of the cookie looking cooked.