I had been searching for a vegan cookie/biscuit recipe for ages but had only ever found ones that resulted in soft, cakey or chewy ones. In a recent search, I stumbled upon the ‘Byron Bay Chocolate Chip Cookies’ on recipetineats. I did a little work in veganising it and got great results. If you are in the United States, unfortunately, white sugar may be a problem as for some inexplicable reason you still use bone char to bleach your sugar. Go figure. If you can find some that says specifically that it is not, that’s great. In my first batch, I used panela, unrefined evaporated sugar, some Australian white caster sugar and a good splodge of molasses. You could probably use any hard sugar substitute but I haven’t tried with other sweeteners…yet. I also used chilli chocolate from Aldi in this first try as my family are currently in 14 covid isolation in Melbourne and that’s all we had in the pantry. Lucky my pantry is like a doomsday prepper pantry.
This cookie is the closest I have made to a commercial choc-chip cookie or any other cookie for that matter. I think it will probably be the basis of my further experiments. Enjoy 🙂
Recipe
175g dairy free margarine/butter
⅓ cup unrefined sugar
⅓ cup white caster sugar
Pinch salt
2 tbsp tapioca flour
4 tbsp water
4 tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp baking powder
½ cup rice flour
1½ cups plain flour
100-200g dairy-free dark chocolate
- Mix sugar, salt, and ‘butter’ together with a hand beater or stand mixer. Use whatever you have at hand if you don’t have these but make sure it is whipped together.
- Add the remaining ingredients minus half the plain flour together and incorporate it with the mixer. Add the remaining flour and mix again until fully incorporated.
- Break up the chocolate into small pieces about the size of your pinky nail. Don’t stress too much about variations in size. You could use chocolate buttons but crushed chocolate works better. Add the chocolate pieces to the dough and mix through with a spoon.
- Roll the dough into a log about 6 or so centimetres in diameter. Lay out a sheet of plastic wrap and roll the log onto it, wrapping the log and turning the ends to seal. Place in the fridge until the dough stiffens, about 1-2 hours.
- Prepare as many trays as you need to hold about 20-24 cookies with baking paper. Take the log from the plastic, slice up the log in 10mm pieces with a sawing motion and place them on the tray. Just make them round with your fingers if they go out of shape.
- Place in a preheated oven at 200c (180c fan forced) for 15 minutes on a middle rack then turn the oven down to 170c (150c fan forced) for another 10 minutes, The temp change is important to properly bake and dry the cookies. Let them cool properly before storage to ensure they stay crunchy.