TRIPLE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES (VEGAN & GF)

Although baking doesn’t come naturally to me, I’ve always loved it and persistently tried to perfect recipes. I’ve never had someone to pass down baking skills to me, so I’m self-taught from numerous YouTube videos, online recipes and blogs. Although cooking as a vegan is as simple and if not, simpler than non-vegan cooking, baking using 100% vegan ingredients is inherently more difficult because you can’t use the usual milk, eggs and butter. Despite this, there are now many inspiring recipes out there to show you can still bake great tasting goods without the unnecessary cruelty. I also made this recipe to be an indulgent treat rather than the more healthy options, as many vegan recipes include oats, nuts and bananas as substitutes.

A lot of current replacements can be hard to source and are not your every-day supermarket ingredients, so I wanted to create a vegan cookie recipe that is easily accessible, cheap and was easy to follow as a rookie baker.

After trialling many different ingredients, I found the perfect ratio to create cookies that are thin, full of chocolate chips, crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle. The fact that this recipe is also gluten free is a happy accident, I believe it adds a much nicer fudgy texture which I prefer with chocolate flavoured cookies. Most recipes call for some type of nut butter in cookies, though I find that peanut butter adds too strong of a nutty taste and other nut butters are too expensive. I resorted to using the accidentally vegan Lotus biscoff cookie butter. It has an amazing caramel taste and is in most UK supermarkets. If you can’t find this particular brand near you or prefer a nutty taste, any nut butter would work fine. I’ve used aquafaba / chickpea water in many recipes before as an egg replacement but using it for cookies was, to my surprise, the most successful. Maybe it’s because of the cookie butter, but you honestly cannot taste chickpeas in this recipe at all!

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Ingredients:

1 cup lotus cookie butter (smooth or crunchy)

½ cup of aquafaba / chickpea water

1 tsp vanilla essence

¾ cup of cocao powder

1 cup brown sugar

½ cup ground almond (optional, but helps make more of a dough than a batter.)

1 tsp baking soda

Pinch of salt

1 cup of chocolate chips/ chunks*

*I used Sainsbury’s dairy free chocolate bars in milk and white and chopped them up into chunks.

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Method:

1. Pre-heat your oven to 170 °C / 350 °F

2. Mix together all dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl, excluding the chocolate chips.

3. Whisk together aquafaba, cookie butter & vanilla in a separate bowl until combined.

4. Combine wet and dry ingredients and fold in the chocolate chips.

5. Line a baking tray with baking paper and spoon on the cookies batter using 2 teaspoons of mixture for each cookie and try to form them into roughly round balls. Space them far apart and do not press them down as the cookies will spread once in the oven. (I greased the tray with vegan butter but I would recommend using baking paper instead.)

6. Bake for 10 minutes in the centre of the oven. (You can tell these cookies are done as they will become slightly cracked on top.) Ensure you do not exceed 10 minutes as it is hard to tell if the cookies are burnt due to the dark colour from the cacao powder.

7. Leave the cookies to cool partially before removing from the tray as they will be soft.

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This recipe makes approximately 20 large cookies.

I recommend eating the cookies still warm (so the chocolate chips are still melty) with a glass of cashew milk. Good luck trying not to eat them all at once as they are incredibly moreish!

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Thanks for reading!