XVX Chocolate Chip Cookies

Two dozen fresh baked vegan chocolate chip cookies. Another 13 cookies were in the oven at the time this photo was shot.

Pretty much everyone has a chocolate chip cookie recipe, so its kind of a non-essential recipe to post, but these are really damn good. Somewhere along the way I started making chocolate chip cookies using a recipe off the back of the bag of some generic store brand chocolate chips that I “veganized.” A girl I dated and I made them so frequently that we slowly tweaked and refined the recipe because she thought the original recipe created cookies that were too oily for her tastes and I invariably thought they weren’t “chippy” enough (Note: chocolate fiend right here.) Here is our take on this classic cookie:

Bowl #1

Mix together the following ingredients until creamy:

• 3/4 cup vegan margarine like Earth Balance or Willow Run
• 1 cup white sugar (I use the Whole Foods Vegan Cane Sugar)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 1/2 “eggs” using Ener-G Egg Replacer
• 1 tsp vanilla flavor (I use Frontier brand Non-Alcoholic Vanilla Flavor. Straight Edge.)

Bowl #2

Mix the following dry ingredients together until evenly distributed:

• 2 1/4 cups white flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt

Combine Bowl #2 with Bowl #1 and mix. Once you have a consistent mixed dough, add the chocolate chips and kneed thoroughly to distribute them. I use:

• 365 Vegan Chocolate Chips (Whole Foods brand)

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and bake for 15-17 minutes.  I roll the cookies so that they are just bigger than the width of a quarter which is a bit more than a tablespoon. At that size the recipe makes around 36 cookies give or take.

End Notes: How can a cookie not be Straight Edge? Admittedly, I’m a zealot, but I am who I am. A few years back a friend of mine threw his birthday party at my house and he had gotten a vegan birthday cake from Bleeding Heart, a local organic bakery. We all mutually agreed that the cake tasted like alcohol, so I gave my piece away and I started digging for answers the next day. As it turned out there was no rum or anything like that in the recipe. However, they used Pure Vanilla Extract in both the cake and the filling, so I asked her to bring out the bottle. Upon looking closely it was marked as being 50% alcohol. As it turns out, in order for a vanilla extract to be called pure, the US FDA requires that the solution contain a minimum of 35% alcohol and 13.35 ounces of vanilla bean per gallon. Double and triple strength vanilla extracts are available. Whereas, natural vanilla flavoring contains real vanilla bean but no actual alcohol. The owner tried to assure me that the alcohol “burns off”, but I needed to look into this myself. Typing “Does alcohol burn off in cooking?” into Google gives this link first:

http://www.ochef.com/165.htm

Searching through a multitude of links I found that all of the links that say it doesn’t burn off are backed up by a few scientific studies, all of the ones that say that it does have no statistical backing. Personally, I’m going to err on the side of science, instead of going with what appears to be a myth passed down through the ages. Now it is true that I’m not going to get drunk off of eating chocolate chip cookies even if 40% of the alcohol remains from the 35% alcohol content of 1 tsp of vanilla extract that remains in my cookies. But I’m a completist and I just can’t see the need for buying and consuming alcohol when its totally avoidable. I even discovered that it is recommended that vanilla extract be removed from the homes of recovering alcoholics because drinking it straight is almost as potent as downing a shot. I probably would have come to this conscious conclusion much earlier but I grew up in a house where non-alcoholic vanilla flavor was always in the cabinet. On a totally unrelated issue, my mom has an extremely strong corn allergy and the ethanol used to extract the vanilla flavor would cause her to break out in hives, so she stopped buying vanilla extract when I was at a young age and bought non-alcoholic vanilla flavor instead. On a final side note, some brands of chocolate chips have vanilla extract in them, so if you’re going to be a zealot like myself keep an eye out for that.