No Bake Peanut Butter Biscoff Cookie Dough Bites

Valentine's Day. I am single and twenty-seven and living in Anchorage, Alaska, which is not exactly a thriving singles market. The dating pool is small, the winter is long, and the ratio of men to women is theoretically in my favor but practically complicated by the fact that many of the available men are here because they're running from something, and I am a woman who has spent her career in an ER and can spot someone running from something at fifty paces.

I don't mind being single. I mind being lonely. There's a difference, and some days the difference is vast and some days it's a crack you could step over. Today it's somewhere in between — a moderate gap, manageable, the kind of loneliness that doesn't require intervention but does require acknowledgment. So I'm acknowledging it. In the kitchen. Where I acknowledge everything.

I made puto bumbong — a Filipino Christmas delicacy that I'm making in February because puto bumbong doesn't care about calendars and neither do I. Purple rice tubes steamed in bamboo — traditionally sold outside churches during Simbang Gabi, the same way bibingka is, the two Christmas street foods that Lourdes describes with such vivid nostalgia you'd think she left the Philippines last week instead of thirty-five years ago.

I don't have bamboo tubes. I used a steamer and small cylindrical molds fashioned from aluminum foil, which is not traditional and would make Lourdes sigh, but the result is close: dense, sticky, purple rice cakes topped with butter, muscovado sugar, and freshly grated coconut. The purple is striking — deep violet, almost black — and the sweetness is layered: the molasses depth of muscovado, the richness of butter, the freshness of coconut. It's not a Valentine's dessert. It's better. It's a dessert that doesn't require another person, that is complete in itself, that tastes like a memory of a church in a country I've never visited.

I ate the puto bumbong on my couch, alone, and it was good. The alone was also good, in a way I'm learning to recognize — a way that doesn't need filling, that is quiet without being empty, that is solitary without being sad. Not every night. But tonight. Tonight the puto bumbong was enough. Tomorrow the loneliness might be a different size. But tonight: butter, sugar, purple rice, and the sound of my own breathing in a warm apartment in the dark. Enough.

I’ve started keeping the ingredients for these on hand the same way I keep the glutinous rice flour on hand — not for any occasion, just for the nights that need something. The puto bumbong takes time and improvised molds and a kind of patient intention I don’t always have; these bites take ten minutes and a bowl and the same basic principle: small, sweet, complete in themselves. No oven. No second person to share with unless you want one. If the purple rice taught me anything tonight, it’s that a dessert doesn’t need to be elaborate to be enough — and neither does the night around it.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 40 minutes (includes chilling) | Servings: 16 bites

Ingredients

1 cup creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup Biscoff cookie butter spread
1 1/4 cups oat flour (or rolled oats blended fine)
3 tablespoons honey or maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/3 cup mini chocolate chips (optional but recommended)
2 Biscoff cookies, crumbled, for topping (optional)

Instructions

Combine the base. In a medium bowl, stir together the peanut butter, Biscoff spread, honey, and vanilla extract until smooth and well incorporated.
Add the dry ingredients. Stir in the oat flour and salt. Mix until a soft, cohesive dough forms. If the dough feels too sticky to roll, add oat flour one tablespoon at a time until it holds its shape.
Fold in chocolate chips. If using, gently fold in the mini chocolate chips until evenly distributed throughout the dough.
Portion into bites. Scoop heaping tablespoon-sized portions and roll between your palms into smooth balls. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet or plate.
Top and chill. Press a small pinch of crumbled Biscoff cookie onto the top of each bite if desired. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes until firm.
Serve and store. Serve cold or at room temperature. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to one week, or freeze for up to two months.

Nutrition (per serving)

No Bake Peanut Butter Biscoff Cookie Dough Bites — A Sweet That Asks Nothing of You