Raw, Eggless, Flourless Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (or, You did WHAT to my chickpeas?)

Yep, chickpeas.  Yep, no bake.  Keep reading!  :)  I decided it was time to get better acquainted with my pressure cooker.  I have a Cuisinart electric pressure cooker that I got at Williams Sonoma a few years ago.  I've used it, with much success, several times, but I always forget about it.  Before those of you that know me get worried that I'm going to blow myself up, the electric pressure cooker comes with built in safety features.

So I love a good theme, and I stumbled about several chickpea recipes I've been wanting to try so I decided to dub this upcoming week "Celebrating the Chickpea"  or "Gaga for Garbanzos," I couldn't decide which one was better.  I bought 4 pounds of dry, plain jane chickpeas at Sprouts:

The instruction manual for my pressure cooker says not to fill it more than 1/3 of the way full when cooking beans.  It also gives instructions for cooking one pound at a time, with 8 cups of water.  I read in another recipe to use 3 cups of water to every one cup of beans.  I also read that one pound of uncooked chickpeas is about 3 cups.  So I decided to cook them one pound (3 cups) at a time, with 3 cups of water, a couple of bulbs of garlic, some absolutely onion wildtree seasoning, some garlic galore wildtree seasoning and wildtree rancher's rub, for 55 minutes using the quick release method.  They turned out perfectly.

I was surprised to find a lot of sweet recipes using the gorgeous garbanzo.  Not only is it a good meat substitute, it's also a great flour substitute.  But what really drew me to this recipe was my family.  My cousin Cyndi has a love for raw cookie dough.  I suppose most of us do, but I won't eat it raw because as a child, my mom told me not to because it had raw eggs in it.  That was enough to scare me out of sticking my finger in the bowl or licking the beaters.  My cousin Cyndi however is a fearless rebel who will just go for it. She's just cool like that.  So when I saw an eggless, not ever meant to be baked cookie dough, I had to try it.  So I scrolled down to read the ingredients.  It has chickpeas in it?!??  What?  And no flour or sugar?  After my shock wore off, I decided it was worth a whirl.  I added to the snack/dessert category for recipes to cook this weekend for the upcoming week.  How cool and decadent will it be to have a couple of spoons full of raw cookie dough after dinner?  So here we go, eggless, flourless, healthy-ish raw cookie dough.  First our ingredients:

2 cups cooked garbanzo beans (or 1 15oz can), drained

1/2 cup of peanut butter

2 tbsp of honey (I added a little extra)

1 tsp of vanilla

1/2 cup chocolate chips (the original recipe called for dark chocolate, I used milk)

Put all of the ingredients, except the chocolate chips in the food processor:

And blend until smooth.  Put the "dough" into a bowl and fold in the chocolate chips.  I added a few extra to the top to make it look pretty:

I fed an unsuspecting boyfriend a spoonful this morning and asked him what it was.  He said "Mmm, cookie dough?"  :)  It doesn't taste EXACTLY like cookie dough with all of the bad for you ingredients, but it is a good fake out and it DOES NOT taste like chick peas.  He was shocked when I told him I'd used them in the recipe.  It was quick and easy, and you should try it and see who  you can fake out.  :)