Chocolate & Peanut Butter Protein Cookies

Before I delve into this (ridiculously delicious) recipe, I want to talk to you about chocolate:

What is it about chocolate? Specifically, about protein powder brands and chocolate? Have the people who create these chocolate-flavored powders ever tasted chocolate? Have their taste buds been desensitized over time? Or are they just on a bizarre vendetta against chocolate-flavored shakes (and foods)? I don’t understand.

I’ve tasted so many foul ‘chocolate’ protein powders in my time. I’d say 40% of them actually taste like chocolate, the rest are sad imitations – mere wanna-bes (kind of like celebrity-lookalikes that look nothing like the celebrities but are out there trying to get gigs and the only people who hire them are people who don’t really know what the celebrities look like in real life).

Look, I’m not going to name any particular brands here. I don’t want to wake up to a freshly-dry-cleaned suit for defamation. All I want to say is that you should be careful when you pick a chocolate-flavored protein powder because, well… if you end up picking a bad one to act as the primary source of chocolate in your life, you’ll eventually forget what chocolate actually tastes like.

This doesn’t HAVE to happen to you though. You CAN actually do something to prevent ending up with a tub of faux-chocolate ‘chocolate’ protein powder. You know, the kind that tastes ashen, bland, saw-dusty, and a bit like… foot? Like ‘traces of foot’ – as if the powder had been pressed by foot.

There are two things you can do:

1. You can get a little sample pouch of the powder in question to see if its chocolatelyness agrees with your taste buds.

2. You can avoid chocolate protein powder altogether by just sticking to unflavored, or vanilla, and adding your own cocoa powder to it when you want to make something chocolate-flavored.

Here’s a recipe to show you how you can do the latter, i.e. how you can turn an unflavored protein powder into a chocolate SENSATION. Ready for it? Here it goes:

Ingredients

1/8 cup cocoa powder
3/8 cup unflavored pea protein powder (read my Note below for substitutes)
1/8 cup coconut sugar
1 tbsp peanut butter (I used crunchy but smooth should work too)
1 tbsp coconut oil
1/2 cup cartoned coconut (or almond) milk

Directions

Chuck all the above ingredients in a food processor and blend it all together until you get a ‘paste’ (see the pic to the left here to see what mine ended up looked like).

Shape the mix into six ‘balls’ and flatten each one on a baking-paper-lined cookie tray.

Bake at 160 C (320 F) for about 20 minutes or until the cookies are cooked through. Do NOT overbake them. It’s best to take them out while they’re still soft in the center, far better than cooking them all the way through because they tend to set a bit more as they cool. So take them out when they’re cooked but not rock-hard-cooked.

Macros per cookie (out of six): 93kcals, 8g protein, 5g carbs and 5g fat!

Note: I used unflavoured pea protein. If you don’t want to use pea protein powder, you CAN use unflavored casein or unflavored rice. You CAN also use a chocolate flavored powder, just make sure it’s one of the nice ones. The ONLY thing I don’t recommend using is whey because whey won’t work with these cookies (wrong texture and consistency). If you choose to disregard this and end up using whey anyways, you’ll end up disappointed: your dough won’t be a dough – it’ll be a wet mush of WTF. Your cookies will also look more like rubberized flat pancakes. So stick to either casein or a veggie powder, yeah?