You may recall from my recipe fails post the sunflower seed butter cookies I tried to make last year. The ones that turned green.
Accidental green cookies, no matter how delicious they taste, are a fail. (And those ones didn’t taste that delicious, either.) But I still wanted to make SunButter cookies. Maybe I don’t learn from my mistakes? But maybe I do, because in this case I learned that baking soda was the culprit – it reacts with the chlorophyll in the sunflower seeds to cause that, um, interesting green color.
The solution was obviously to just leave out the baking soda. Enter three-ingredient SunButter cookies!
You are probably familiar with three-ingredient peanut butter cookies. They are pretty much the quickest and easiest cookies in the world: three ingredients, about 15 minutes total to make, and probably less time than that to devour the whole batch. They’re not especially healthy, but you know, these things have to be overlooked sometimes. They’re the perfect recipe for budding bakers to impress everyone with, and the clean-up isn’t too bad either. But best of all (for me and my SunButter cookie craving, that is), baking soda is not among the three ingredients. Cha-ching!
So I did what any reasonable human being with an unreasonable SunButter cookie craving would do: I swapped some Sunbutter in for the peanut butter in that easy recipe. Done! Just like that, I had three-ingredient SunButter cookies.
It probably goes without saying that these are a lot like the peanut butter version, but different. They taste exactly like the ingredients you put in them, so if you don’t love sunflower seed butter… well, stick to the peanut butter version. But if you are a sunflower seed butter fan, and especially if you or someone you’re baking for has a peanut allergy, I can’t recommend these enough! They are just heavenly eaten right off the cooling rack, dipped in a cold glass of almond milk.
Obligatory milk-balancing picture. My milk-balancing skills are apparently not so good, because I lost the first cookie I tried to balance into this glass of milk. Had to eat that one – darn it! Food photography is pretty strenuous.
Three ingredients, two dozen cookies, one satisfied craving, zero green spots in your baked goods. Huge success!
- 1 cup sunflower seed butter (I used natural SunButter)
- 1 cup sugar (I would not recommend substituting this, especially with a liquid sweetener)
- 1 egg
- (optional) sea salt for topping
- Preheat oven to 350 and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
- Mix sunflower seed butter, sugar, and egg together in a medium bowl. The mixture will be thin at first; stir for about 30 seconds until it thickens up.
- Roll tablespoon-sized spoonfuls of batter into balls. Place several inches apart on the prepared baking sheet. (They should not spread too much while baking.) Use a fork to press a criss-cross pattern into them. Top with sea salt if desired.
- Bake cookies until they puff up slightly, about 10 minutes. They may not turn noticeably golden brown, but they are done nevertheless. Cool in the pan on a wire rack. These cookies are great while still warm, and are best on the day they're made. Enjoy!