If you love my chewy vegan peanut cookies with chocolate chips but have a peanut allergy, try these sunflower seed butter cookies instead. This recipe is inspired by my 3-ingredient vegan peanut butter cookies. At first, my goal was simply to check if the sunflower seed butter was turning cookies green. I have done a lot of research on the science of sunflower seed butter in baking and learned that if you mix sunbutter with baking soda, a chlorophyll chemical reaction happens, releasing chlorophyll and a green crumb as the cookie cools down. As an avid baker, I wanted to try and see with my own eyes. After baking the same recipe four times (yes, I have tons of cookies in the freezer now!) I noticed that the green color in sunbutter cookies doesn’t show up every time – it only happens once out of 4 trials, and the picture below shows you how sharp the green color can come out.
Ingredients and Substitutions
I tried replicating the same recipe but with different ingredients substitutions: all-purpose flour, oat flour, baking soda, almond flour, and adding vanilla extract with alcohol. I also wanted to create a crunchy cookie, but not too dense either, and my goal was to use maple syrup to avoid white sugar. After many experiments, I found that the best combination of ingredients was three simple ingredients:
Sunflower Seed Butter – I recommend using unsalted, unsweetened seed butter, or the cookies come out too sweet and salty. All-Purpose Flour – While oat flour or almond flour works, the result is less crunchy, fragile, and a bit powdery. That’s why flour is my go-to ingredient for this recipe. Maple syrup or any liquid sweetener like agave syrup or coconut nectar.
Then, feel free to stir in 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract or a 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. Vanilla adds flavor, and if yours contains alcohol then it inhibits the chlorophyll reaction when you add the baking soda. It means you should have a brown, crunchy cookie without any green color showing.
Making and Baking
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