Name: Gluten-Free Cashew Butter Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 8 min
Total time: 28 min
Yield: 16
Cuisine: American
Ingredients: ¾ cup cashew butter; ¼ cup shredded coconut, sweetened or unsweetened; 1 large egg; 1 cup coconut sugar (or light brown sugar); 1/3 to ½ cup gluten-free chocolate chips; ½ tsp vanilla extract (I use my homemade version); 1 tsp baking soda

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These Gluten-Free Cashew Butter Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies are heavenly! And yes, they’re flourless.

So many of you know how much I love flourless recipes. For good reason.

Flourless recipes make the main ingredients in a recipe shine in a way that’s not possible when you add gluten-free flours and starches (either individually or in a gluten-free all-purpose flour mix, homemade or store bought). The best, most well-known example here on gfe may be my Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies that so many of you have come to know and love.

You probably already know that cashew butter can be very pricey. Because cashews themselves are pricey. But I enjoy cashews very, very much and I enjoy cashew butter every bit as much. In fact, I need to use cashew butter in a recipe lest I grab a spoon and devour the whole jar. (Okay, I’ve never actually done that with cashew butter but I may have eaten half of a small jar in one sitting in the past. Don’t ask me about Nutella back in the day!)

My local grocery store carries its own brand of organic cashew butter that is much less expensive than most brands you see, especially those sold online. (As in 25% to 50% less than popular well-known brands that I have seen.) Admittedly, the store brand is not nutritionally equivalent to the pricier brands and it’s not the completely no-stir kind that I prefer when I want to use cashew butter for spreading on muffins or toast.

However, it does work just fine for adding to baked good recipes like these cookies. Bonus … one jar of it is enough to make two batches of these cookies. I really appreciate that fact!

Key point. This simple cookie recipe rose out of my need to have delicious cashew butter-based cookies that didn’t include oats as did the previous cashew butter cookie recipe that I shared here on gfe. Gluten-Free Cashew Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies. With National Oatmeal Cookie Day (April 30) coming up, that recipe and more importantly, the need for an alternative, came to mind.

Here’s the story on why. I updated that post and all the others that featured recipes that included oats several years back. I updated them to show that Gluten-Free Watchdog had issued a warning that included a report showing testing results of numerous gluten-free products that contained oats (cereal, granola, oats, oat flour, etc.)—even certified gluten-free oat products—that tested gluten full.

I know that gluten-free individuals continue to consume oats but I don’t recommend it. Since that initial warning came out, I have avoided oats in every form. Gluten-Free Watchdog has continued to do periodic testing for this category of products that has revealed there are still some such products containing gluten at 5 ppm or above. Sometimes well above the 20 ppm level (the upper limit acceptable to qualify as gluten-free for gluten-free labeling requirements). You can subscribe to Gluten-Free Watchdog to receive individual product reports sent out immediately after testing is complete.

So, all that said, I decided to replace the oats in the original recipe with shredded coconut, which I’m happy to say worked perfectly. Yay!

Although these simple-to-make delicious cookies look as if they may contain cocoa powder, they actually do not. It’s the coconut sugar I used—for the batch I made that’s shown in the photos here—that gives the cookies that richer, darker color. These cookies will be much lighter in color if you choose the light brown sugar option instead. Using either will result in wonderful cookies though!

Note that this recipe makes about 16 cookies, which I honestly think is the perfect number. Most of the time anyway. If you need more, you can easily double the recipe. And you absolutely might decide you do after you try them!

More Flourless Recipes You’ll Want to Check Out (Here and Elsewhere)

~ Crustless Flourless Cheesecake

~ Flourless Brownies

~ Flourless Magical Muffins

~ Flourless Gluten-Free German Chocolate Cake

~ Flourless Intense Chocolate Almond Bites

~ Flourless Orange Almond Cake

~ Flourless Macaroons

~ Flourless “Nutella” Brownies for Two

~ Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

~ Flourless Peanut Butter Blossom Cookies

Gluten-Free Cashew Butter Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

Yield: 16 cookies