SRC: Orange Chocolate Macaroons

Wow,Secret Recipe Club time came around fast this month! It totally caught me by surprise near the end of my OAMS cycle, and due to poor planning on my part, I happened to be completely out of flour and oats. That pretty much eliminated any baking, and I didn’t have time to try any main dish recipes. Thankfully, Cupcake Muffin, my assigned blog, came to my rescue with a simple recipe that not only requires minimal ingredients (that I happened to have on hand, miracle of miracles) but that also tastes amazingly delicious. Even better? I’m the only one in the house that can eat them, so they are all mine. Muahahahahahahah! There are some perks to being the only person in the house without any dietary issues.

As for next month: I will not run out of wheat flour and I will finish my Secret Recipe Club long before it’s due. I’m trusting you all to keep me accountable, OK?

Now back to my assigned blog: Cupcake Muffin is written by Sara, a grad student at Berkeley who cooks up some pretty amazing stuff. From creative ways to serve vegetables (Carrot Fennel Salad, for example), to delicious new twists on old dinner-time favorites (try the Chicken Tinga Tacos), to decadent desserts (how about some Grapefruit Mint Tarragon Chocolate Tart?), she’s got you covered! After all, she’s been blogging since 2007, so there’s a lot of great content to be discovered.

For reasons already mentioned, I chose to make her Orange Chocolate Chip Macaroons, which turned out to be quite serendipitous. Orange and chocolate is a combination I love , and I always enjoy trying new recipes to utilize it. These macaroons were no exception! Delicious, in a word. You definitely won’t be able to eat just one.

I made only a portion of the recipe, since, as I mentioned, I’m the only one in the house who can eat these. So here’s my small batch version, which doesn’t differ much from Sara’s original recipe.

I would recommend using Let’s Do Organic or Tropical Traditions dried coconut for this recipe, as most other versions have lots of sugar and other unnecessary ingredients in them. If you use the right kind of coconut, these will actually be some pretty healthy cookies!

These cookies were so QUICK to make - they do take a long time to bake up (25 minutes) but the prep time was minimal, 10- minutes or less.

Deliciously EASY, too. For some reason I always thought macaroons were hard, but not so!

This recipe uses minimal ingredients (especially in a small batch, which is great if you don’t need a large quantity), so it’s a great CHEAP treat.

If you use the right kind of coconut, and chocolate chips with real ingredients, these cookies can be relatively HEALTHY. They still have sugar, so they’re not a health food, but they’re a healthier option for snack than most cookies (especially store-bought ones!).

Intrigued by the Secret Recipe Club concept? Join here!

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