Coconut Flour Peanut Butter Cookies

Gluten-free baking gives me anxiety sometimes: sometimes I get a delicious treat, and sometimes I end up with hockey pucks. Well, I’m happy to report these coconut flour peanut butter cookies are a home run! These are soft and chewy, quite the opposite of the dry, and crumbly texture you sometimes get from grain-free baking.

These cookies are naturally gluten-free and grain-free. But they’re so good, you can bake them for everyone, not just for those with different dietary needs.

Even more, you can easily make them keto or paleo-friendly by swapping the sugar with an appropriate sweetener.

It is rare to find one dessert that makes everyone happy, but this one does the trick!

Note: If you love peanut butter, make sure you check out my Peanut Butter Granola recipe, my Peanut Butter Balls, and my Peanut Butter Chocolate Overnight Oats for some additional recipe inspiration!

📌 Ingredients

✅Peanut butter – I recommend using a processed PB like Jif as the organic variety has oil that will cause issues. If you have a sensitivity to Peanut Butter, give Sunflower Seed Butter or alternative nut butters a shot.

✅Coconut flour – This is the only ingredient that you may not have used before if you are new to making gluten-free cookies. Coconut flour is a fine and soft flour made from coconut meat, ground into a gluten-free, low-carb flour. It is slightly sweet and mild, but when you bake with it, you won’t notice it at all. When BAKING with coconut flour, you will not substitute 1:1. One cup of all-purpose flour is equal to 1/4 cup of coconut flour.

✅Eggs

✅Sugar

✅Vanilla extract

✅Heavy cream

✅Baking soda

🍽️ Instructions

👉Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. 

👉Step 2: Use a mixer to combine the peanut butter, eggs, and sugar together.  Mix in the vanilla and heavy cream, until smooth. 

👉Step 3: In a separate bowl, mix together the coconut flour and baking soda. Pour this into the mixing bowl with the wet ingredients to mix until combined. Don’t forget to scrape down sides of bowl as needed so all ingredients are incorporated. 

👉Step 4: Once the dough is ready, drop by spoonfuls onto the baking sheet.  Press flat with a fork. Bake for 12-15 minutes (edges and top must be golden brown).

👉Step 5: Once out of the oven, quickly dip them into additional sugar and allow them to finish cooling on a wire rack.

🍽️ Are these Keto friendly? 

No, this recipe is not naturally keto-friendly.  It can, however, easily be adjusted. 

To make these peanut butter cookies a keto-friendly recipe, start by making sure you are using a natural, sugar-free peanut butter. Look for ones that have no added sugars.

If the sugar-free peanut butter you’re using doesn’t contain any salt, be sure to add a pinch to the cookie dough. It needs it!

You will also need to switch the sugar for something like Swerve or a Monk fruit sweetener to stay keto-friendly. 

🥗 Is this Recipe Paleo friendly? 

This is not a paleo-friendly recipe.  As true paleo does not allow for legumes, and peanuts are legumes, it would not be considered a paleo recipe. In addition to the peanut butter, sugar is not a paleo ingredient and would make this recipe as is, not paleo friendly.  

If you truly wanted to make this into a paleo recipe, you could substitute a different nut butter that is paleo-compliant and use a product like Swerve or Monk Fruit to sweeten the cookies. 

I think full-fat coconut cream would make the best substitute for the heavy cream to make these dairy-free and paleo-friendly, but I haven’t tried it yet. If you give it a shot, let me know how it worked in the comments below.

🥄 Meal Prep Tips 

Always, always, always look out for ways to make life easier by meal prepping as much as you can. This recipe lends itself to meal prep in a couple of ways.

• My first choice is to always make the cookies into balls and freeze them on a sheet pan for 6-12 hours. Remove the pan from the freezer and place all of the cookie dough balls into a gallon-sized freezer-safe Ziploc bag. Always make sure it is freezer safe! 
• My second choice would be to place all of the ingredients in little containers already measured out and ready to do a quick “dump and go.” Going this route saves you about 10 minutes of finding ingredients and measuring it all out. 

📌 Expert Tips

🔸When making cookies, always take the time to measure properly. Remember baking is all about the science and if you happen to put even 2 tbsp more flour into the recipe, it can start to adjust the outcome of the cookies.

🔸When baking a recipe for the first time, always go for the LOWEST time that is offered. So if it suggests 9-11 minutes, set the timer for 9 minutes and see how they are doing. Everyone’s oven is slightly different.

🔸When baking with peanut butter, I suggest using a Jif or the like and not the natural version that has the oil in the jar on top. I prefer to eat the natural version but in baking it is adding more oil/moisture and I don’t recommend that you add potential problem into the mix. So I tend to have a jar of Jif for baking and the creamy natural peanut butter that I eat in the refrigerator.

If you found a fix for working with natural peanut butters when baking cookies let me know. I would love to try it!

❓ FAQs

Coconut Recipes

Tried this recipe? Please leave a star ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating in the recipe card below and/or a review in the comments section further down the page. You can also stay in touch with me through social media by following me on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook!