Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Makes about 16 3" cookies or 5 dozen mini 1.5" cookies.

• 1/2 cup vegan butter (our local walmart carries Smart Balance which works well)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup applesauce
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup white flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup (vegan) semisweet chocolate chips

Some tips:

The butter is key- you might have to leave it out for a few hours if the butter has been in the freezer. I'm impatient and if I haven't prepared the butter earlier in the day, I'll want to melt it down in the microwave, but liquid butter makes the dough runny and doesn't blend well with the other ingredients. You can heat it up for intervals of 10-15 seconds until the frozen butter lets up, but I wouldn't let it melt completely. If you have a little more patience than me, leaving your stick of butter on the counter for a few hours by a window or under a bowl (the bowl traps the heat escaping from the butter and warms it up a lil more) probably works best. Try to get the butter to a squishy consistency where you can press your thumb into the butter and it'll leave an indent. 

I don't really bake with eggs so instead I use applesauce for cookies and vinegar for cupcakes (sounds gross, I know, but it really works!!). Recently, I've also been using Bob's Red Mill, and it's worked pretty well. There's a lot of replacements out there and the science behind it all is fascinating. 

Okay onto the recipe~

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Mix the butter with the two sugars. Using an electric mixer is easiest but if you don't have one on hand (or know how to operate one #sos), you can mix it by hand too.

3. Add the vanilla and the applesauce to the wet ingredients and mix again!

4. Lots of people mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl before adding them to the wet mixture... That makes one more dish to wash so I just add the dry ingredients straight. But if you want to mix the salt and baking powder with the flour first so that it's evenly distributed, that's probably a better idea. Anyways, I add the flour in. Adding the whole cup at once can be a lil tricky to mix in so it's a good idea to add half a cup at a time and then mix. Or add it all at once if you're an impatient baker like me. And then toss in the salt and baking powder.

5. The BEST part: when the dough is all mixed, I just take handfuls of chocolate chips and pour them in until my heart is happy. I said 1 cup on the ingredient list above, but I really have no idea how much I use. Just keep adding them until you like the dough-to-chocolate ratio.

6. Now, this is probably ready to put in the oven but when I made these cookies today, I added a lil too much applesauce so my dough was runny. It's a bad idea to put runny dough in the oven- it makes for thin, flat cookies that don't hold their shape and blend into the cookie next to it. Not fun. I put the dough in the fridge and had to WAIT two hours (ugh I swear, baking teaches me so much about patience because it does not come naturally).

7. The oven should be warm now. Take tiny little pieces of dough and roll cute lil balls to make cookies about 1.5 inches in diameter. I like to add a few extra chocolate chips to the top for flair. Freeze the extra dough for later (or eat it because you can, because no eggs).

8. Bake for 9 minutes at 350, checking periodically to make sure nothing has burned in case your oven works differently from mine. Mine turned out a lil soft, so maybe bake them for a few extra minutes if you want crunch. There's no fears about underbaking these though because no EGGS!

9. Now WAIT as your cookies cool but mini cookies don't take long at all so you can eat them in a moment. Enjoy! 

xoxo, 
Juhi