No-Bake Cacao and Goji Super Cookies from Naked Food Magazine

It’s the holidays. How about some food? Vegan. No bake. Yummy. What more can you ask for?

This is a recipe adapted by Naked Food Chefs.

INGREDIENTS
2 cups oats
3 organic bananas
½ cup coconut, shredded
¼ cup goji berries
¼ cup nuts, chopped (almonds, walnuts, macadamia)
½ cup, raw cacao powder
½ cup dark chocolate chips (optional)
(See substitution information at the end)

DIRECTIONS
1. In large bowl mix all ingredients and blend with fork or by hand until mix is homogeneous.
2. Using a spoon or scooper, make 1” balls. Serve. Woot!

We didn’t bake ours. But you can. Place on cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 8 min.

There weren’t many left. We covered the few we had in wax paper and put them on a low shelf in the fridge. When we were ready for more, we brought them out and let them set out at room temperature for 1/2 hour. They hold up well in the freezer too. Thaw and repeat as before.

Substitutions:

Just like you, we come across recipes that we don’t have all of the ingredients for. My give up factor is pretty high. I don’t like going out for a couple of ingredients. So we try the recipes with our own substitutions. When that happens we let you know what we think.

Goji Berries. You can replace the taste with dried currants or dried cranberries. We tried the cranberries because we had some left over and I loved them. But try not to substitute them if you can.

Goji berries have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for 2000 years. Goji berries are a high-antioxidant anti-inflammatory fruit. We found some at Target.

Cacao Powder.

Cacao is the purest form of chocolate you can consume, which means it is raw and much less processed than cocoa powder or chocolate bars.

One Green Planet has everything you need to know on Cacao vs Cocoa. You will never want that other stuff again! So head on over there. Wait a minute. . . . we found dark chocolate chips at Target. One stop shopping. Oh yeah.