Confession time: when I decided to make these, my intention was for them to be cookies. Clearly, that didn’t work out too well for me. But even though I didn’t end up with cookies, I did end up with some pretty delicious blondie bars. And how can you go wrong with blondies?
As I was making these, I unfortunately had a slight little bump in the road that caused me to change up my original plan. You see, when it came time to add the flour, I accidentally added coconut flour. I don’t know how I did this, seeing as the coconut flour bag looks completely different than the bag of almond flour, but I guess I was just distracted by the March Madness basketball game on TV!
Luckily I realized the mistake pretty quickly, but not quick enough – I had already added a whopping two whole cups of coconut flour. For those of you who are familiar with coconut flour, you know that a little bit goes a long way. Coconut flour tends to soak up any liquids pretty easily, and too much can cause the product to become dry and crumbly. Whenever I bake with coconut flour, I use maybe 1/4 – 1/2 cup max. So therefore, as you can probably guess, two full cups is way too much!
Luckily, most of the coconut flour I added to my mixing bowl was sitting right there on top of all the other ingredients, so I was able to scoop most of it out and save my dessert from being a total disaster. However, there was still some of the flour that I just couldn’t get to, so it was just going to have to stay.
Once I made the mistake of adding the coconut flour, I kind of just threw my recipe aside and started to wing it. I added a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and then ultimately, I realized that I was going to have to cross my fingers and just hope for the best.
The batter ended up very wet and a bit sticky, and I knew that if I decided to make cookies (like I had originally planned), they would’ve just fallen apart. Therefore, I decided to throw it in a pan and make some cookie bars (or blondies) instead.
As they were baking, my whole kitchen started to smell incredible! So even if the bars didn’t end up tasting good, at least I had a great-smelling kitchen that would last for a day or so!
When it was time to cut into the cooled bars, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. Surprisingly, these bars turned out absolutely delicious! I thought they were going to be a complete and utter disaster, but they weren’t. They were a little bit on the soft side, but still had a decent amount of crunch and held up nicely without falling apart. All-in-all, I avoided a disaster and managed to salvage it into something surprisingly delicious!
If there’s one piece of advice I can give you, it’s this: make sure you are paying attention while you bake – don’t make the silly mistake of adding the wrong type of flour, like I did!
- ½ cup coconut oil, melted
- ⅔ cup coconut sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 egg white
- 2 TBSP almond milk
- 1 tsp. almond extract
- ½ tsp. vanilla extract
- ½ tsp. baking soda
- 2½ cups almond flour
- ~1/4 cup coconut flour
- ½ cup slivered almonds
- 1 cup chopped cherries (I used frozen ones that had defrosted slightly)
- Preheat oven to 375 F. Grease an 8x8" baking dish and set aside.
- Melt the coconut oil and add the coconut sugar. Mix well.
- When mixture is slightly cooled, add the egg, egg white, almond milk, almond extract, and vanilla extract.
- Add the dry ingredients, and then fold in the cherries and almonds.
- Pour batter into prepared baking dish.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until tops are browned and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
