Healthy Zucchini Oatmeal Cookies with chocolate chips are soft, chewy and packed with wholesome ingredients! These gluten free vegan zucchini cookies are the perfect breakfast cookies and to enjoy as a snack or dessert.
If banana bread can turn into banana oatmeal cookies, so can zucchini bread. This healthy breakfast cookie recipe I'm sharin' today are the cookie version of zucchini bread-- and yes, they really are as chewy, thick and wholesome as they look.
Nutritious vegetable packed oatmeal cookies are THE way to use up home grown garden zucchini, along with my favourite zucchini muffins and baked zucchini oatmeal-- of course.
How to Make Zucchini Oatmeal Cookies
These healthy zucchini cookies are made with the simplest of ingredients, most of which are pantry staples:
- Ripe Bananas: Bananas help bind the cookie and gives a touch of sweetness.
- Peanut Butter: Binder and oil replacer. Plus, peanut butter just makes cookies taste x10 better.
- Maple Syrup: Naturally sweetened with this magic liquid, it also helps hold the cookies together. You can also use any liquid sweetener of choice.
- Gluten Free Oats: Used as both a flour and whole. Oatmeal and zucchini pair so well together and makes these cookies whole grain and nutritious.
- Zucchini: Use large grate to keep the texture of the zucchini and ring out some of the water to prevent the cookies from getting overly soggy.
- Dark Chocolate: Chunks or chips. Jumbo or mini. Or both! I used sugar free dark chocolate chips to keep these refined sugar free but you can use any chocolate of your choice.
- Cinnamon + Vanilla: Gives these cookies a lovely comforting flavour.
All these ingredients get mashed and mixed together, formed into balls using a cookie scoop and baked for about 10-12 minutes.
Healthy Zucchini Cookie Variations
These zucchini cookies are super customizable and you can make a couple substitutions + lots of flavour variations. Here are some suggestions:
- Switch up the add-ins: Raisins, cranberries coconut, walnuts, pecans, almonds and/or sunflower seeds can be used instead of or in addition to the chocolate chips. If you enjoyed my lemon zucchini muffins, you can also add some lemon zest or extract.
- Nut-free: If you can't have peanut butter, try almond butter or cashew butter. For nut free, you can also use sun butter.
- No Bananas: You can use pumpkin instead and add a few tablespoons of coconut sugar to compensate for the sweetness.
- Other flours: You can swap the oat flour for spelt flour, almond flour or whole wheat flour. You could try using half the amount of coconut flour, although I have not tested this myself.
- Spices: Take the spices up a notch by adding in some ginger, nutmeg, cloves and all spice!
LOOK AT HOW BEAUTIFUL THEY COME OUT. Perfectly swirled. Perfectly fluffy. Perfectly tall. Kinda (really) mesmerizing.
More Zucchini Recipes:
If you recreate this Healthy Zucchini Oatmeal Cookies recipe let me know how you liked it by leaving a comment and rating below or by tagging me on Instagram @Okonomikitchen, I love seeing all of your tasty recreations!
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Healthy Zucchini Oatmeal Cookies
Vegan Zucchini Oatmeal Cookies with chocolate chips are thick, chewy and loaded with this summer vegetable! These are the perfect healthy zucchini cookies for breakfast, snacking or dessert.
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 12 minutes
- Total Time: 22 minutes
- Yield: 10 cookies 1x
- Category: dessert
- Method: baking
- Cuisine: vegan, gluten free, north american
Ingredients
- 1 scant cup shredded zucchini, water squeezed out (120g grated, 95g after liquid removed)
- ½ medium banana (about 62g)
- ⅓ cup peanut butter (80g)
- 2 tbsp maple syrup (40g)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract (5g)
- ½ cup gluten free oat flour (60g // made from blending oats)
- 1 cup gluten free rolled oats (90g)
- ½ tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- ¼ tsp salt
- ⅓ cup chocolate chips (55g)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silpat.
- Grate your zucchini and weigh out 120g (a little less than 1 cup semi-packed). Squeeze out some of the moisture, it should be about 90-100g depending on the water content of your zucchini.
- In a large bowl, mash the banana and then add in the peanut butter, maple syrup, vanilla and zucchini and mix until well combined. Add in that oat flour, oats, baking soda, cinnamon salt and mix until a thick sticky dough forms. Fold in the chocolate chips.
- Use a large cookie scooper and portion out 10 cookies (about 45-50g each). Bake for 10-14 minutes or until cookies are golden brown around the edges. Mine were perfect at 12 minutes. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 3-5 minutes. Then transfer to a wire rack and allow them to cool for another 10-15 minutes. Enjoy!
Notes
- Storage: Keep cookies in an air tight container covered, refrigerated for up to 4-5 days.
- Helpful Equipment: grater, cookie scoop, mixing bowls, spatula, cookie baking sheet, parchment paper, silpat
- Nutritional Information Disclaimer: Nutrition information is a rough estimate calculated on an online tool (Cronometer) without add-ins.
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 cookie
- Calories: 142
- Sugar: 4.8g
- Sodium: 139mg
- Fat: 5.8g
- Saturated Fat: 0.9g
- Unsaturated Fat: 3.4g
- Trans Fat: 0
- Carbohydrates: 18.4g
- Fiber: 0.9g
- Protein: 4.6g
- Cholesterol: 0
SAVE IT FOR LATER! ↓
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Sarah says
Super easy, yummy breakfast cookies! Definitely feels like a healthy cookie, but it's delicious, and I think that's what this recipe is going for anyway. I didn't have oat flour on hand, so I used regular flour and it came out great!
★★★★★
Lisa Kitahara says
Awesome to heat it works with regular flour, so glad you enjoyed Sarah!
Jessie Sierra says
I could eat three of these, they look so good! Perfect for a healthy treat for the kids when they go back to school!
★★★★★
Lisa Kitahara says
So glad you enjoyed them Jessie, happy to hear your kids enjoy them too!
Hasu says
Just made these for my family today and they absolutely LOVED it! I love how its super HEALTHY yet so delicious!! Thank you for this recipe Lisa!!
★★★★★
Lisa Kitahara says
Thank you for trying them Hasu! I'm so happy you and your family loved them <3
Sahar Sheida Pugh says
Fabulous recipe. Mine came out perfect; the key is to ring out as much of the moisture from the zucchini as possible to ensure a more crunchy texture. My first batch came out “wet”; second batch which caused me to ring out more of the moisture of the zucchini, turned out PERFECT. I added in 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts for an even more crunchy texture and that made these even better.
★★★★★
Lisa Kitahara says
So glad to hear you enjoyed! And yes definitely ask zucchini holds a lot of water and is released when introduced to heat. I love the addition of the walnuts, I'll have to add that to my next batch! Thanks so much Sahar 🙂