Recipe #6 - Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

My brother challenged me to bake my way through the New York Times Top 11 Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes, mostly so maybe I would send him some to “taste-test.”

And why not?

I printed all the recipes, scanned the ingredients and spent about $60 on the stuff I did not have, like cake flour and coconut sugar - not including the cookie scoop that I have always wanted and finally bought. I did not buy any super special ingredients. No chocolate feves, no Maldon salt.

This is a surprisingly good cookie, despite looking like one of those “healthy” cookie bites. If you’ve never used a “flax egg” before, this is one of those simple vegan substitutes, and no, I do not know how this works, but it does. The flax and the water combine to create a gel similar to an egg white. This recipe is different as it has you adding the flax right away - the recipes I have used usually say to let it mixture sit and gel for a few minutes first. But, this seems to work.

The dough itself (delicious!) has a dense whole-wheat appearance due to the coconut sugar and the flax - so I expected a very dense texture, but the cookie is cakey and lighter than I thought it would be. The recipe seems to be concerned with spreading, but these cookies do not spread much at all.

There are negatives, however. First of all, this is an really expensive cookie to make, so make sure you really really like those vegans in your life. Vegan butter (I used Flora brand, $3.29 for 8 oz)) isn’t cheap. Neither is coconut sugar (Simple Truth Organic, $4 for 16 oz). Flax meal is about $4 for 1 lb (Bob’s Red Mill). Vegan chocolate chips are about $4 for 10 oz (I used Simple Truth for these but usually use Enjoy Life chips).

I did not use cane sugar, although my usual go-to granulated sugar is sugar cane, not beet. The description in the recipe is the first I’ve heard of sugar being processed using animal products, specifically bone char to whiten the sugar, although none of it ends up in the sugar in the end. The coconut sugar is subbing for brown sugar (same processing issues as granulated).

And this recipe makes a very small batch of cookies. All of these NYT recipes seem to make giant cookies - this one makes 8. As usual, I made normal-sized cookies using my 1.5 TBS scoop and got about 2 dozen.

“The resulting cookie looks, bakes and tastes like a classic chocolate cookie.” - eh, not quite. But it’s a really good alternative.

Reviews Pending!