Cinnamon almond crunch chickpea bars
This Thursday evening was spent procrastibaking and watching women's skating on the Winter Olympics. I whipped up these cinnamon almond crunch chickpea bars!
If you've tried my peanut butter chocolate chip chickpea cookies, these are another tasty variation that is slightly easier to handle and is friendly to our friends with peanut allergies or those that aren't huge fans of chocolate (idk how people don't like chocolate, but I respect your existence and want you to have tasty options too).
While these might look like cookies, and even taste kind of like cookies, they are definitely not real cookies! I like to think of them more as homemade protein bars. I'm not a huge fan of most protein bars because I don't usually like the taste of added protein, and after a while I start to feel like I need something other than a Lara bar or trail mix as a snack. These bars really hit the spot!
Beyond switching up the flavors, I tweaked the recipe here slightly from my original because I ran out of milk, and also didn't need an extra spoonful of almond butter for taste because of the almond crunch on top. Feel free to play around with the recipe and let me know how that goes in the comments below!
Cinnamon almond crunch chickpea bars
Ingredients
- 1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
- 1/4 cup unsalted almond butter
- 3 T honey
- 1/4 cup + 3 T oats
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp sea salt
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup raw almonds
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325 F. Line a 9 x 9 or 8 x 8 inch pan with parchment paper.
- Blend chickpeas, almond butter, 2 T honey, 1/4 cup oats, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, salt, and vanilla in a food processor until the batter is smooth.
- Use a spatula to transfer the batter into the pan, spread evenly and press into corners. Try to get most of the batter out of the food processor so you don't need to rinse it before the next step.
- Pulse together 1 T honey, 3 T oats, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and almonds in the food processor until almonds are chunky. Spread this evenly on top of the batter in the pan.
- Bake 15-20 min or until edges are golden brown. Let cool before cutting into desired size squares.