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Gluten Free No Bake Cherry Walnut Flax Seed Cookies
These cookies are great for people who can’t have wheat and it’s okay for O blood type people if you are on the Eat Right For Your Type diet.
If a cookie can be called healthy this is pretty darn close. It does have sugar and butter but not as much as most dessert recipes and you can’t get much healthier than cherries, walnuts, flax seed and oats.
Cherries are good for arthritis and have antioxidants, walnuts are brain food and who doesn’t need that, I know I do.
If you don’t have dried cherries you could really substitute any dried fruit: apricots, prunes, raisins or even cranberries.
For the nuts if you don’t like walnuts or don’t have any you could substitute: almonds, pecans, pine nuts or even pumpkin seeds. In place of the flax seeds you could use sesame seeds or even coconut.
Be creative and use what you have on hand, I bet any of these combinations would be delicious just make sure you chop your fruit and nuts real fine so they are small and mix well in your cookies. Keep your measurements the same, adding too many nuts or fruit will make it difficult to hold together.
These freeze well so if you have a family gathering or holiday party and need to prepare something ahead of time you can just put the lid on your glass baking dish; put them in the freezer instead of the refrigerator and thaw them an hour or two before serving.
There is no baking and prep time is quick.
Ingredients
- 3 cups old fashioned rolled oats
- 1/2 cup walnuts, finely chopped
- 3 tablespoons flax seeds
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup butter or hard margarine
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup dried cherries, finely chopped
- 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring
- Line a rectangle glass baking dish with wax paper. The kind that has a lid works great because you’re going to store these in the refrigerator. If you don’t have one any baking pan will do and you can cover it with aluminum foil. You just want to cover it well.
- In a large mixing bowl, combine oats, chopped walnuts and sesame seeds. Set aside.
- In a 2-quart saucepan, combine sugar, butter and eggs. Cook over medium-low heat until it starts to thicken, stoves differ so keep an eye on it. If your fire is too high you’ll make sweet scrambled eggs, which might taste yummy but not what we are going for.
- Then add your dried cherries. Keep cooking until it’s thick, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Stir in your vanilla. Pour fruit mixture over oat mixture stirring until it’s all mixed together.
- While it’s still warm but cool enough to touch, shape into 1-inch balls. Your mix will look crumbly but it will stick together you just have to squeeze it in your hand. Towards the end mine was sticking to my hands really bad and not wanting to stick to each other so I took a square of wax paper, put about a tablespoon or so of cookie in and used that to squeeze it into a ball. That seemed to work really well and if you don’t like getting your hands messy you could use this to do the entire batch.
- Place in your glass baking dish, cover with lid or plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator.
That’s it; they are ready to eat. It’s best to let them chill a bit so they aren’t messy on the hands but even then they are still delicious.
If you take them to an outdoor function where it’s warm you might want to make sure you keep them in an ice chest because if they get warm they will be messy.
