High-Protein Edible Red Velvet Cookie Dough (Gluten-Free)

Red velvet is one of the more underrated flavors out there. It’s part vanilla, part chocolate, and 100% delicious.

Today we’re taking my protein cookie dough recipe and transforming it into edible red velvet cookie dough.

This red velvet cookie dough contains real Oreo cookie pieces in it, elevating each spoonful even further.

The entire recipe contains 500 calories, which may seem like a lot, but it also comes packed with 40g of protein! Break this red velvet cookie dough up into as many servings as you’d like to help you hit your protein goals in the most delicious way possible.

If you were to eat half of the recipe, it would be 250 calories and 20g of protein, which is comparable to any protein bar out there, but WAY tastier.

This red velvet cookie dough is no-bake, gluten-free, and only requires a couple of minutes of prep time!

 

What makes red velvet cookie dough different?

This edible cookie dough is very similar to my original protein cookie dough recipe, so if you’ve made that one before, this will be a breeze.

There are three things we are doing differently with this red velvet cookie dough to make it different:

1. We will be using chocolate protein powder instead of vanilla protein powder to create that classic red velvet flavor.
2. The addition of red food coloring turns this into a true red velvet recipe.
3. We’re replacing chocolate chips with crushed-up Oreos to elevate the recipe.

Red velvet is a very unique flavor in the sense that it is technically a form of chocolate, but it’s very mild chocolate. To replicate that flavor in this cookie dough, we’re going to use chocolate protein powder. When combined with the rest of the ingredients (including vanilla extract) it’s going to give us the perfect balance we are after.

I use this chocolate protein powder from PEScience, which I find to have the best flavor of any protein out there. You can use any chocolate protein powder you’d like, but I highly recommend sticking with protein powder that is a blend of whey & casein protein.

You can use 100% whey protein, but whey protein by itself typically yields a very sticky result. The addition of casein protein creates a much thicker end result, which is what we want in edible cookie dough. Check out my Protein Powder Substitution Guide to see the differences illustrated.

If you want to grab yourself some PEScience protein, you can use the code “Matt” to save 10% (it’s the protein powder I use in all of my recipes, so it’s worth purchasing if you plan to make more recipes of mine). I’ve used Quest Nutrition protein with very similar results as well.

 

How to Make Healthy Red Velvet Cookie Dough

Since this recipe is no-bake, all we need to do is mix up the ingredients, but the order in which we mix everything matters.

To start, we’re going to mix up all of the dry ingredients except for the protein powder. The chocolate protein powder is going to be the very last ingredient added to bring everything together (since protein powder is very absorbant).

Then, we’ll be adding the butter, syrup, vanilla extract, and red food coloring directly into the bowl.

When you mix this up, it’s going to leave you with a thick red paste.

Note that I didn’t measure the amount of red food coloring used, but you’ll want to use enough to create a deep red color as you see here:

Now, we’ll add the chocolate protein powder. By adding the protein powder last, it brings everything together into cookie dough. It will seem dry, but continue mixing until it all comes together and there is no dry powder left in the bowl.

Break up your Oreo cookies and fold those in.

Now, the final step is to let the cookie dough chill in the fridge for at least one hour.

I added my red velvet cookie dough to a small container with a lid and let it sit overnight, which I find to yield the best result, but one hour works great. The time in the fridge is necessary for the flavors to come together.

If you skip the chilling process, the flavor will not be as developed. With no-bake recipes, you almost always want to give them at least one hour of chilling time. I won’t pretend to understand the science behind it, but the flavor improves significantly as it sits!

You can dig right into the bowl with a spoon, or you can re-create my Stuffed No-Bake Cookie Dough Bites using the red velvet cookie dough!

 

Can This Red Velvet Cookie Dough be Baked?

Short answer: not really.

This red velvet cookie dough tastes like true authentic cookie dough on its own, but it still contains some healthy substitutions that don’t hold up well to baking.

I attempted to bake my original protein cookie dough, and the results were very dry cookies:

To make delicious protein cookies, you need to make some key adjustments.

If you’re interested in making red velvet protein cookies, I have a bunch of protein cookie recipes here on my blog that you can adapt to become red velvet cookies. Here are some of my favorites:

 

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