Healthy cookie dough promises full flavor without full fat

This pin promised me a “Healthy Cookie Dough Dip recipe - made with chickpeas.” And I suppose it delivered on that. Clicking on the pin, the blog written by a woman named Marianna, says “It tastes exactly like cookie dough.”

As a former kitchen helper who grew up with the privilege of licking the spoon and beater, I cannot get enough cookie dough. Sometimes I make cookie dough with the intent of just eating cookie dough. Though the sugary goodness is delicious, it’s also a tad fattening (I don’t know if you heard but eating a vat of dough is probably bad for you), so I naturally was stoked at the idea of something healthy that tastes “exactly like cookie dough.”

So one night when I got home from work and my sweet tooth hit, I thought I’d give it a shot.

The ingredients are pretty simple and so are the instructions, so I stuck to them as best I could.

Ingredients

2 cups of chick peas (You can buy a can in the store. Just be sure to drain them.)
1/2 tsp. of salt
1/2 cup of chocolate chips
2 tsp. of vanilla
3 TBSP of sugar
2 TBSP of coconut oil (or any oil)
2 TBSP of milk

Instructions

Mix everything together in a food processor. Or pulse in a blender. Everything, BUT the chocolate chips. You want to pulse it until everything is really smooth. When you finish just add chocolate chips and serve!

How it went

I don’t have coconut oil, nor have I been able to locate it anywhere in a grocery store, so I used the canola oil I had lying around, it fits the “or any oil” part, right?

I piled everything into my Magic Bullet and attempted to get everything “really smooth.” As you can see this didn’t work too well. The dough was still pretty chunky after I blended it for an extended period of time (3+ minutes), so I added a touch more milk and a touch more oil, maybe a teaspoon of both. This seemed to help but again the texture was still pretty rough.

When I’ve made hummus in the past I’ve been able to get everything pretty smooth, but this wasn’t supposed to be nearly as creamy as hummus is.

I tried taking it off and stirring it to get it to get the dough to mix better. Nothing seemed to work. After about five minutes of struggling with it, I figured this was as good as it was going to get texture-wise. So I spooned the most well-mixed parts of the dough into a bowl.

I added the chocolate chips and thought, “This really looks like cookie dough!”

Results

This poor blogger must have had an awful childhood filled with terrible cookies if she thinks this is what cookie dough tastes like.

It was awful. I had two bites and had to put it down. It wasn’t sweet enough. It wasn’t creamy enough. It tasted nothing like cookie dough to me. When I got a bite of the chocolate chips it made it bearable, but overall it was too chickpea-y. I like chickpeas, but if I’m expecting something “exactly like cookie dough” they are not high on my list of things I want to taste.

I tried to rescue it by adding more sugar. Nope, nothing could be done. It was awful. I ended up throwing it down the garbage disposal.

If this is what all healthy cookie dough alternatives are like then I will happily take the calories, fat and sugar of real cookie dough. I guess I’ll just work on moderation with the real thing, and cherish those full-fat memories of licking cookie dough off the mixer attachment.