The secret ingredient for the fudgiest holiday cookies

These sweet treats deliver chewy decadence, thanks to dates

Hey friends, and welcome back to Cool Beans! Anyone else in the middle of a holiday bake-a-thon? This year I’m taking a different approach to cookie season and making sweet treats with zero refined sugar. Don’t freak out: I promise this isn’t a diet post—we don’t do that during the holidays, or ever really.

The switch has been on my mind because the climate crisis has been driving up the cost of sugar. It’s the highest it’s been since 2011 as a result of extreme drought, specifically in Thailand and India, two of the largest exporters for sugar behind Brazil. The hike isn’t as noticeable in the U.S., where our prices are already higher than the global standard, but it’s enough to make me rethink how I’m sweetening my cookies this Christmas. The goods I’m making this week are still plenty sweet, and irresistibly chewy thanks to a pantry secret ingredient. Ready to bake? It’s a date.

The review: 25-minute peanut butter cookies

It’s peanut butter cookie time! Credit: Gabriella Vigoreaux

Most dates in the U.S. come from California’s Coachella Valley, where they grow in giant clusters on palm trees. The largest of our domestic varieties are medjool dates, which are the plumpest, stickiest, and most decadent of them all, with a flavor that evokes maple syrup and brown sugar. I always have a large box of them in my pantry for snacking (bonus points if they’re stuffed with peanut butter) and for baking. 

I love the chewy texture and pockets of sweetness they create. I’ll chop ’em and throw ’em into banana breads or oatmeal cookies instead of raisins, and every December this sticky date olive oil cake is on heavy rotation. Since medjool dates are so soft, you can also easily blend them into a purée to sweeten your bakes in lieu of sugar. This year’s obsession are these date-sweetened peanut butter cookies. They sold me with the super-short ingredient list (all things I had on hand) and ease of prep. 

Check out the full recipe for Okonomi Kitchen’s peanut butter cookies

This cookie dough comes together in only five minutes—even faster if you already have oat flour lying around. If not, throw some oats in the blender and pulse them until you have a floury meal. Then you add the rest of the ingredients: dates, peanut butter, baking soda, salt, and a few tablespoons of nondairy milk. In about 30 seconds you have a sticky dough. All that’s left to do is roll it into balls, flatten slightly, and bake. There’s an optional chocolate drizzle, but I wanted to see if the cookies were sweet enough on their own. 

If you like soft-baked cookies, these will be your jam. Personally, I’ll be making them whenever I have a hankering for a warm PB cookie in a hurry. The results are plenty sweet, even without sugar, and feel oaty and wholesome. I’d probably eat them for breakfast or a snack more than as a dessert. For true holiday decadence sans the sucre, I have a date with another type of cookie…

The recipe: Is it a brownie? A cookie? Peppermint bark? Yes!

These cookies are a mashup of two Christmas classics: chocolate crinkle cookies and peppermint bark. They are sweetened with date purée but also have a healthy dose of plant-butter, so they have a supreme fudginess and a caramel-like complexity. The texture lies somewhere between cookie and gooey brownie. After baking they get dunked in white chocolate and sprinkled with crushed candy canes, which, once set, creates a peppermint bark shell around these holiday gems. 

These peppermint bark cookies have a chewy bite. Credit: Gabriella Vigoreaux

Peppermint Bark Brownie Cookies

Yield: 12 cookies