Recipe: Paleo Chocolate Chip Cookies

Fall makes me want to bake. Well, it makes me want to bake even more than usual. I looooooove baking. I am that girl who randomly brings baked goods into the office (well, I was when I had an office) just because I had the urge to bake. 

Going gluten free and paleo really seemed to take the joy of baking away from me. 'Gluten-free All-purpose' flour is not really a good thing.. It replaces wheat flour with all kinds of rice starch, potato starch... still going to spike the heck out of your blood sugar (of course it is, it's going into baked goods), and leaves you with a weird grainy texture.

In my hunt for baking recipes, it was hard to find 'traditional' things...  sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, etc. Ok, Elena's Pantry has a great brownie recipe. But there was no simple, classic, GOOD chocolate chip recipe. Everything out there was 'hazelnut chocolate chip', or 'maple bacon chocolate chip'. They sound good, but they aren't what I want. And the few plain chocolate chip cookie recipes I could find weren't quite..   right.

So last night, I was feeling a bit blue, and I decided to bake. I had modified a recipe earlier that got me very, very close to what I wanted, and I decided to give it one more try. When I tested the final product, I declared to my husband that, "I win paleo chocolate chip cookies." He agreed, and also declared these 'dangerous'. And the best part of all? They really aren't that complicated!!

I did grind my own almond flour using a NutriBullet my mom got me (we don't have the dry blade for our Vitamix). This yielded a finer flour than Bob's Red Mill Almond Flour - and at half the cost! - but you should be fine using whatever almond flour you prefer.  

Paleo Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 C. almond flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 3/4 tsp. sea salt
• 2 Tbsp. vanilla
• 3 Tbsp. honey
• 1/2 C. grassfed butter, softened
• 1/2 - 3/4 C. dark chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat oven to 350. 

Put almond flour, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Use a fork to mix until well blended. 

Add vanilla, honey, and butter. Use a hand mixer on low to blend all ingredients together. Dough will be very wet.

Scoop dough by rounded teaspoon onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. (Leave room, these cookies will spread!) I did 9 per sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes.  

Be sure to let them cool either on the pan, or lift the parchment paper onto a cooling rack!  At 8 minutes, these will be soft, but much more crumbly when handled. At 10 minutes, they had a tiny bit of crunch and did not fall apart (my perfect cookie).  

Yields roughly 20 cookies... try not to eat them all at once!