Healthy Chocolate Cherry Thumbprint Cookies

Preheat oven to 350ºF. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. Set aside.

In a food processor, pulse dates and almonds until finely chopped. Add oat flour, eggs, chia seeds, flax meal, rolled oats, honey, salt, vanilla, cinnamon and cocoa powder and process until mixture is well combined and comes together into a dough. Add mini chocolate chips and pulse a few times to mix evenly.

Scoop dough by tablespoonfuls (a 1-tablespoon cookie scoop works well for these) onto prepared baking sheet, spacing them 1-2 inches apart. Lightly grease the end of a wooden spoon and use it to make a small indentation on top of each cookie (or just make a hole with your thumb). Place 1/2 teaspoon cherry jelly into the hole in each cookie. Bake for 10 minutes, then allow to cool on cookie sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Once cookies are completely cool, prepare the glaze. Whisk together powdered sugar, milk and vanilla in a small bowl, adding a little more milk if it’s too thick. Drizzle glaze across the cooled cookies; you might not need it all.

Allow cookies to sit out for several hours and then store in a container that is not airtight at room temperature. If you keep them in an airtight container, they will get sticky—they keep the cookie-like texture if they are stored in a non-airtight container. They keep well for up to 1 week.

Note: You can use any kind of jam/jelly for these cookies. I used a homemade cherry jelly that was quite low sugar to keep them as healthy as possible. You could also omit the glaze if you’d like to eliminate the processed sugar, but you might want to increase the honey by a tablespoon or two if you do that, as they might not be sweet enough then. Again, they would be a bit sweeter if you use regular jam/jelly instead of low sugar.