By My Dad would love these. They remind me of Eat-More bars, but they’re made with entirely healthy ingredients! They’re slightly sticky – slightly chewy – nutty and sweet – with undertones of toffee! They’re packed with seeds: sunflower, pumpkin, ground flax, and tahini (made from sesame seeds), which means these cookies are full of nutrients, including minerals and healthy fats.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups dates (deglet noor)
- enough water to just cover the dates
- 1/4 cup tahini
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/3 tsp coarse salt
- 1/4 cup ground flax
- 1 cup of rolled oats ground into a flour
- plus additional 1/2 cup rolled oats
- 1/2 cup roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds
- 1/2 cup raw pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
pitted dates, raw pumpkin seeds, tahini, coarse ground oats, ground flax seeds, sunflower seeds
Instructions:
Roughly chop the dates (being careful to remove any pits) and toss them in a pot. Add barely enough water to cover the dates and simmer uncovered until most of the water has evaporated and the dates are soft and mushy. Stir them a few times to prevent burning.
Use a food processor to grind 1 cup of oats into a coarse flour. Transfer to a bowl.
Scoop the cooked dates into the food processor. Add the tahini, vanilla and salt and blend together to make a paste. Add all the remaining ingredients, including the oat flour, and pulse to mix and break up the seeds.
Drop batter by the spoonful onto a baking tray. You can line it with parchment paper to prevent sticking. Press each cookie with a wet fork. Bake at 300° F for 20 minutes. I bake these on a stone and it takes a little longer. The edges and raised bits should darken slightly and the bottom should be a deep golden brown. Overbaking them slightly gives them a stronger toffee flavor, but be careful not to burn the bottom!
Cook the dates. Pulse the ingredients together. Spoon mixture and press with a fork.
These Sweet and Seedy Cookies are perfect with a cuppa tea or as a travel snack!
Store them in a sealed container at room temperature for a week OR throw them in the freezer! There’s something about having homemade cookies in the freezer that makes me feel like a rockstar.
This recipe is a nut-free adaption of Brenda Davis’ walnut cookies.
If you try them, let me know what you think in the comments below.
She Shapes 
Thanks for the fantastic recipe, Danielle! These are hearty and satisfying in the way that peanut butter oatmeal cookies are. They also kept my more sugar-based snacking at bay after eating them. I didn’t fully read the directions and so forget to take out the dates’ pits before grinding them through the food processor, but I didn’t ruin it! I just kept pulsing the processor to a finer paste to make sure I wouldn’t break my teeth on date pits. You could make these any size, but I made 1-inch balls before pressing them flat with the wet fork. They didn’t spread or change shape in the oven at all, so I fit 20 on one baking sheet and 16 on another – 36 cookies! To get any browning on the bottom, I had to cook them at 300 degrees for 25 minutes and then boosted it to 350 for another 5 minutes, for a total of 30 minutes. Sooooo yummy!
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Thank you Joy for taking careful notice of the temperature and time required to get browning. I probably bake mine about 30 minutes as well, but I put them in the oven on a cool stone, which makes everything take longer. I’ve also burnt the bottoms on a few batches, but we always eat them anyway. 😋 Your notes are very helpful. I’m glad you enjoyed them (pits and all).
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