A Less Major Fail: Chocolate Chip Cookies with Garbanzo Bean Flour

What do garbanzo beans, carob, and Seinfeld all have in common? Chocolate chip cookies of course!

A few weeks ago my mom brought home garbanzo bean flour and I have been searching for a cookie recipe to use it in. My first experiment with garbanzo bean flour did not turn out well...it gave my carrot cookies (as seen in an earlier post) a bad aftertaste...awful. But I found a solution: Jessica Seinfeld's recipe for garbanzo chocolate chip cookies from her cookbook Deceptively Delicious. I haven't tried them, but rumor has it that they are delicious! (deceptively delicious, that is). If you want the recipe but don't want to buy the book, it is all over the Internet.

I did a little bit of substituting (as always). Her recipe actually calls for canned garbanzo beans, but I used the garbanzo bean flour instead, which gave it a peanuty taste. And I used steel cut oats (because that is all we had in the house) which aren't great for baking, but they still tasted yummy. And I ran out of chocolate chips so I used half chocolate chips and half carob chips (if you like carob, you can substitute all the chocolate chips for the carob chips. But with half and half, you can't really tell the difference between them). 

We also had vanilla agave nectar, which I used to supplement the vanilla extract and sugar.

So with  this new recipe in hand, I began to create my own recipe. I felt pretty confident about it, but I was still a little worried about using almond meal, knowing that it doesn't rise like normal flour. I thought using an extra egg would help but...well...the as the cookies spread, so did my disappointment.

Unfortunately these did not turn out as I had planned. Although they taste good, they are almost impossible to eat, and I've resorted to scooping them into a microwaveable bowl with a dollop of whipped cream. Spring Break is next week, so I will have more time to try this recipe again.