Why Did My Cookies Turn Green?

Look, I am not an expert baker but I do know my way around a KitchenAid mixer. One of my favorite recipes is to make my ever so popular homemade peanut butter chocolate chip lactation cookies. Seriously, it’s been shared over 40,000 times on Pinterest!

These babies are delicious but this past week when I made them, they turned green. I am not talking a pretty Tinkerbell green, I am talking like a gross, mold looking green. That was entirely unintentional.

I started trying to figure out if I had done anything different and even checked my ingredients to see if any of them had expired. Nope.

So, I did what any normal person would do. I tried them and they didn’t taste any different. The fact that I am still alive to write this tells me they weren’t toxic.

So, why did my cookies turn green after baking them?

In order to figure out why, I had to look into if I did anything different then it hit me!

I wrote that recipe back in 2012 right after I had my first son and when my second son was born in 2014, we unfortunately found out he had a severe peanut allergy so we kissed all of the peanut butter in the house goodbye.

That is when we replaced peanut butter with Sun Butter in our home. In case you don’t know, this is a peanut butter alternative made from sunflower seeds and is allergy friendly but tastes like the real thing.

I ended up switching out the peanut butter for Sun Butter instead so then I searched and guess what?

“When substituting SunButter in your existing recipe, you may have to reduce the baking soda/powder by about one-third. The chlorogenic acid (chlorophyll) in sunflower seeds reacts with the baking soda/powder when baked, causing the green color when the cookies cool. This is completely harmless! Depending on the recipe, a splash of lemon juice may also help.” (source)

So, as you see there is nothing wrong with green cookies and you won’t die from eating them. In fact, the taste the same, they just look disgusting. In reality it’s just SCIENCE doing what it does best.

These would be a pretty neat experiment to make for St. Patrick’s Day though!