I love dairy.
Cream, butter, milk, yogurt, cheese – I love them all. I especially love to bake with dairy.
But there’s no denying the fact that we should all eat less meat and dairy, to limit the amount of climate change we are creating.
I have done my fair share of dairy-free baking in the past but it tended to involve obscure ingredients and questionable techniques and textures.
The reason I love this recipe is that the ingredients are all straightforward (if not entirely wholesome!) and the resulting vegan cookies are so delicious that they deserve to be baked and enjoyed, even without the sweet addition of the moral high ground.
The critical technique involved here is a sort of porridge that binds the vegan cookie together, in place of eggs. A stick blender is used to whizz up oats and water and then strained through a sieve to leave just what Stella Parks at Serious Eats calls the ‘Oat Slurry’, which I prefer to think of as sludge (perhaps because it rhymes with ‘fudge’ rather than making me think of a quarry??)
The original recipe calls for olive oil, but the choice of olive oil is apparently crucial in order to give the cookies the right flavour. I didn’t have the inclination to get experimenting with different olive oils, especially when I had some gorgeous hazelnut oil just waiting to be used. The flavour was so good, I can’t see myself wanting to go down the olive oil route any time soon.
I have tweaked the ingredients as is always necessary (and indeed, the very reason for my starting this blog) when working from an American recipe, with French or British ingredients but here’s a link to Stella’s article as it has plenty of tips. I highly recommend following her account on Instagram too @bravetart.
You can mix (or rather, knead) in the chopped hazelnuts instead of pressing them on top of the unbaked cookie dough mounds. It is definitely more fiddly to top the cookies with them but I found that the hazelnuts that ended up in the middle of the cookies were strangely waxy. When I’ve bothered to roast and skin hazelnuts, I want them to be crunchy!
And finally, make absolutely sure you slightly under-bake these vegan cookies. The thing they have in common with their dairy-dependent cousins is that an under-baking transforms a nice cookie into an amazing cookie.
If you’re not up for trying vegan cookies, make sure you give these a go:
Soft, chewy, buttery, perfect pecan & chocolate chip cookies
Decadent double dark chocolate cookies
Matcha and white chocolate cakey cookies
You’ll need a (stick) blender and ideally the small jug it came with (or a mug or jam jar could be used instead) and a couple of baking trays
Makes 14-16 cookies
Ingredients
- 42g porridge oats
- 85g water
- 170g light muscovado sugar
- 3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/8 tsp ground cinnamon
- 135g hazelnut oil
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 210g plain flour
- 150g dark chocolate, chopped
- 70g hazelnuts, roasted and roughly chopped
Method
Heat your oven to 180°C and prepare 2 baking trays with baking paper.
Next, measure the oats and water into your stick blender jug (or a mug or jam jar that your stick blender head fits into) and blitz them with the stick blender. Tip the blended mixture into a sieve and use a spoon to push the thick liquid through, leaving behind the lumps. Whatever remains in the sieve can be thrown away. Put the liquid which has passed through the sieve to one side. (Stella warns you to not do this in advance as it will thicken up too much. As a big porridge-maker, I believe her)
Next, whisk together the sugar, bicarbonate of soda, salt, baking powder and ground cinnamon. Spend a bit of time getting rid of the clumped-together sugar.
Add the oil, vanilla extract and 58g (equivalent of 2oz, hence the strange weight) of the oat sludge and whisk until smooth.
Use a spatula to incorporate the flour until fully absorbed and then knead in the chopped chocolate.
Warning: the dough will not be the consistency you are used to. It will seem oily but have faith and press on!
Use a quick-release ice cream scoop to form mounds of dough and space them out well on the baking trays.
Press chopped hazelnuts onto the top of each of the cookie dough mounds
Pop 2 trays of cookies in at the same time but be aware that the tray lower in the oven will probably need a couple more minutes once you’ve taken the top tray out.
Bake the cookies for 14-15 minutes. Start checking from 12 minutes – you’re looking for the edges of the cookies to be golden and the middles to still be puffy and soft.
Leave them to cool on the baking trays and store in an airtight container.