Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love making something for my friends to help them through tough times as well as helping them celebrate fun ones -- upcoming exams, engagements, and of course birthdays. Well my best friend Kori moved back to North Carolina last week for a new job (she's from CT too but we both went to undergrad in NC), and she was nervous and excited all at the same time -- a perfect opportunity for cookies! Kori offers a particular challenge since she doesn't eat eggs or butter, but she wouldn't be Kori if she wasn't a little difficult, so I started an internet search for the best vegan chocolate chip cookies and voila...

Making vegan chocolate cupcakes as I did for Kori's birthday doesn't digress much from a non-vegan recipe, but substituting butter and eggs in cookies is a bit more challenging. As you can see from the photo, the cookies have some cracks in them -- this is mostly because the recipe calls for oil, which is a cheaper and somewhat easier alternative in this case to vegan butter, but the stability suffers as a result. Since I made these for her to snack on during the 13 hour road trip, I ended up wrapping them individually in seran wrap so they didn't crumble too much. With that being said, these cookies were delicious, no matter what kind of diet you adhere to. The addition of molasses really helps achieve the classic chocolate chip cookie taste, and I particularly enjoyed the crunch of the turbinado sugar. I also love the look of chopped dark chocolate in cookies instead of chocolate chips, so that choice made these even more enticing.

If you follow a vegan diet or have a vegan friend moving hundreds of miles away, consider making these cookies and the world will truly be a better place. From this blog you could gather that I'm clearly not vegan, but I do limit my intake of animal products as much as possible -- using almond milk in my cereal every morning, incorporating meat into dinners only once a week, and choosing not to eat mammals (i.e. pork and beef). There's a variety of ethical and health reasons that go into all this, but I just think it's important to educate yourself on what you choose to put in your body and respect the choices of others. And if you're interested in other vegan recipes, you have to check out my friend Kori's fabulous blog:  www.kori-lynn.com!

Enough of my soap box, onto the cookies...

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Adapted from Kirsten's Kitchen

2 cups flour

1 cup turbinado sugar (or granulated sugar)

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup dark chocolate chips/chunks (make sure they're vegan!)

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup soy/almond milk

1 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp dark molasses

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees

- In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate chips.

- In another bowl, combine the vegetable oil, milk, vanilla, and molasses.

- Add the wet mixture to the dry and mix well with a wooden spoon or your hands to get the mixture well incorporated.

- Roll dough into compact balls, place on a parchment paper-lined pan, and squish them down to form saucers.

- Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. Let cookies cool for 5 minutes on the pan before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Recipe yields about 16 cookies.

** If you want to try using vegan butter instead to improve the stability of these cookies, just substitute the amount indicated for oil, and cream the room-temperature "butter" in the bowl of an electric mixer with the sugar. Then mix in the rest of the wet ingredients, followed by the dry. Let me know how that turns out if you try it!