Make Easy, Fruit-Sweetened, High Protein Peanut Butter Cookies in Your Air Fryer (Diabetic Friendly)

These cookies are good! They are soft, squishy, and loaded with peanut flavor. The cookies also are worth eating from a nutritional standpoint and are designed to minimize blood sugar spikes. That's especially important if you're diabetic or taking GLPs. Dates are the primary sweetener for the cookies rather than refined sugar or artificial sweeteners. Oats and white whole-wheat flour add extra flour and texture to the cookies, and loads of peanuts give the cookies their characteristic "peanut butter" flavor as well as protein. You can add dark chocolate chips (which do have sugar in them), if you'd like or leave the cookies plain. I also occasionally substitute a small amount of peanut butter chips for the chocolate chips (again, the peanut butter chips have sugar in them, so go easy on the chips if you decide to add them). The cookies make a great simple dessert or snack, mix up in minutes in a food processor (or use a big blender), and cook quickly in the air fryer. Enjoy!

How to Make Easy, Fruit-Sweetened, High Protein Peanut Butter Cookies in Your Air Fryer (Diabetic Friendly)

Air Fryer High Protein Peanut Butter Cookies (Diabetic Friendly) -- Makes about 16

1 cup of rolled oats (old fashioned or quick cooking)

1 cup of pitted dates

1 1/2 cups of unsalted, dry-roasted peanuts, divided, plus optional extra peanuts to

decorate the tops of the cookies

1/3 cup of canola oil

1 large egg

1 teaspoon of vanilla

2/3 cup of milk

2 tablespoons of white whole-wheat flour

1/4 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

1/2 -2/3 cup of dark chocolate chips

Put the oats in a food processor and process them for a minute or two until they are partially ground. Add the dates and process them in with the oats until they are ground into the oats. Add 1 cup of the peanuts and process them in for a minute or two. Add the oil, egg, vanilla, and milk and process them in for a minute or two until everything is well blended. Add the white whole-wheat flour, the salt, baking soda, and baking powder and process them in. Add the remaining 1/2 cup of peanuts and pulse them in 3-6 times or just until chopped a bit and distributed throughout the dough. Remove the S-blade from the food processor (carefully!) and stir in the chocolate chips by hand. Cut small pieces of baking parchment to fit your air fryer basket and drop dough mounds onto the parchment, using about 2 tablespoons of dough for each cookie and leaving a couple of inches between the mounds. With damp fingers, flatten out the dough mounds until they are about 1/2-inch thick. If you'd like, you can sprinkle some extra peanuts on top of the dough to decorate the cookies. Air fry the cookies at 300 degrees (yes, that's correct--you don't want the oats to burn) for 10-12 minutes or until the cookies are light brown and still a tiny bit squishy. Let the cookies stand for a few minutes before trying to remove them from the parchment.

How to Make Easy, Fruit-Sweetened, High Protein Peanut Butter Cookies in Your Air Fryer (Diabetic Friendly)