Recipe: Vegan Peanut Butter Cookie Bars

I wanted to bake something for book club this week, and since one of our members is vegan, I always like to make something she can eat. I found this recipe on the Three Little Chickpeas blog, and since I love peanut butter desserts, I thought this was worth trying.

Ingredients

• ½ cup (120 g) unsweetened natural peanut butter (with salt) (measure after stirring)
• ¾ cup (130 g) granulated sugar
• ½ cup (125 ml) dairy-free milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1  ½ cups (180 g) whole-wheat flour, spooned and leveled
• ½ cup (90 g) vegan chocolate chips
• 2 tablespoons (13 g) ground flax seed
• 1  ½ teaspoons baking powder
• Pinch of salt (if your peanut butter doesn't contain salt use ¼ teaspoon)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 F (180 C).
2. Line an 8x8 inch glass baking dish with parchment paper.
3. Mix together the peanut butter and sugar with the back of a fork until the sugar is mixed into the peanut butter.
4. Then to peanut butter mixture, whisk in the dairy-free milk and vanilla extract until smooth (a balloon whisk works well here).  Make sure there are no large clumps, a few tiny lumps are fine.
5. In a large bowl whisk together the whole-wheat flour, chocolate chips, ground flaxseed, baking powder, and salt.
6. Add the wet ingredients to the flour mixture and mix together with a rubber or silicone spatula. The dough will be thick.  
7. Press the cookie dough into the glass baking dish and spread it out to the corners. Use a silicone spatula to help spread the dough out (Use damp hands to pat down and smooth out the top).
8. Bake for 16-18 minutes.  To test lightly press the top of the cookie dough (careful it's hot), if your fingerprint stays, cook for another 1-2 minutes. The top should look set, puffed up, and spring back slightly when touched.
9. The cookie bars need to cool completely to set, if you cut the bars while they're too warm they'll crumble. I let them cool for around 15 minutes in the dish, then lift them out with the sides of the parchment paper to a cooling rack to cool completely.
10. Store in the refrigerator and they'll firm up more once chilled.

As usual, I didn't stick to the ingredient list as written. I didn't bother trying to find vegan chocolate chips, so I just went without (same with the flaxseed). I used regular flour, and my non-dairy milk of choice was plain soy milk. 

At first mixing the peanut butter and sugar was a little tricky, but eventually the peanut butter did absorb all the sugar. And it wasn't too hard making sure the wet mixture wasn't clumpy. I appreciated the tips about using a fork for mixing and damp hands for pressing the dough into the pan. Speaking of which, I don't have a glass square pan, so I used a metal one; when making this switch, you always want to shorten the bake time (I did 12 minutes and maybe could have gone a minute or two longer).

I think I've made both better peanut butter desserts and vegan desserts before, but this one isn't bad. These bars are quite dense and rich, so a small square is plenty! These probably would be better with the chocolate chips to add a little change in the texture. I'll remember that if I make them again!