Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies.md

Yield

~40 cookies (2 sheets)

Ingredients

• 281 g all-purpose flour
• 20 g almond flour (helps with crispyness though you can replace with regular flour in a pinch)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 88 g vegetable shortening
• 88 g fake butter (e.g. Earth Balance)
• 160 g granulated sugar
• 165 g brown sugar (light brown preferred)
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp Ener-G egg replacer
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 bag (2 cups) 60% dark chocolate chips
  • Buying good-quality chocolate chips is a KEY part of this recipe. I don't want to see any of that Nestle rubbish!
  • To be strictly vegan, you will need to use vegan dark chocolate. I've had pretty good luck with Enjoy Life brand, though it might not be easy to find.
  • Though not fully vegan, I'd also recommend Ghiradelli and Guittard's dark and semi-sweet chocolate chips, which have a very rich flavor.

Tools:

• Stand mixer
• Small dough scoop (~1tbsp)
• Parchment paper
• Silicone baking mat (e.g. silpat)

Time:

Making dough: 20-30min

Baking: ~30min per batch

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 360°F
2. Mix together flour, almond flour, salt, and baking soda in a medium mixing bowl.
3. Beat shortening, butter, white and brown sugar, and vanilla in the mixer until creamy, about 3-5 mins on medium-high speed.
4. Combine egg replacer and water together in a small bowl, and mix thouroughly with a fork. Then, add egg replacer mixture gradually to the mixing bowl while beating at medium speed. Next, beat on medium for another ~2 mins.
5. Gradually beat in flour mixture at the slowest possible speed.
6. Pour in chocolate chips and mix on low until combined.
7. Prepare a baking sheet with a silicone mat, then a sheet of parchment paper on top of it. The silicone keeps the bottoms of the cookies from being burned by the sheet, and the parchment paper provides makes for easy cleanup and also provides extra insulation. You may be able to get by without the silicone in a pinch but I recommend it.
8. Spoon cookies onto the pan with the dough scoop. I usually do smaller cookies in a 4x5 grid, but you can also make them bigger and space them further apart.
9. Bake for 11-13 minutes, or until all of each cookie has turned golden. If you want, you can prepare the next baking sheet during this time.
10. Remove sheet from the oven (will be extremely soft) and allow cookies to cool and finish cooking on the sheet for an additional ~5 minutes.
11. Transfer cookies to a plate/container, and repeat until all cookies are baked!

Note 1: It might be a good idea to do a test sheet with only 3 or 6 cookies on it first, to make sure you have the mix right and that your cooking time is correct. This way, you won't lose a good chunk of the yield if you cook them for too long or something.

Note 2: I strongly advise against trying to cook two sheets in the oven at the same time. It never ends well, one sheet always gets overcooked on the top and the other on the bottom. With the method described here, you can have one sheet in the oven while the other is cooling and then being populated with new dough, so you can go just about as fast as if you were baking two sheets at a time.