A few days ago, I posted a trial recipe for
two kinds of vegan cookies. You can go back and read it, if you'd like, but the gist is, the maple ones were amazing and the chocolate peanut butter ones were really weird.
So here I am with the promised update.
Vegan Chocolate-Peanut Cookie
- 1/4 cup canola oil
- 1/4 cup unsalted peanut butter (crunchy if you want delicious peanuty bits in your cookies, smooth if you don't)
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- 1/3 cup brown sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 4 oz AP flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 2 Tbsp cocoa powder (I used dutched, but either should work fine)
- ~1/2 tsp salt (to taste--since there's no eggs, you can eat it straight from the bowl)
- ~1-2 T of water (however much you need to turn it into a moist but still dough-y dough)
I used pretty much the same procedure as last time, except that I mixed half the sugar with the fats, and then added the other half with the dries + water. According to
J. Kenji López-Alt, the more dissolved sugar you have, the more caramel flavor you get. Sugar, because it is hydrophillic, will dissolve readily in water but not in oils or fats (think of mixing sugar and water like mixing oil and water or (water-based) vinegar). And a grain of sugar's not dissolved, it can't melt into other grains of sugar and make all that awesome caramel flavor. But too much caramel would be weird, especially in a chocolate-peanut butter cookie, where it might be flavor overkill. (The sugar went in with a moderate amount of water in the previous version, but there was so much peanut butter in that one, you couldn't really taste anything else). I'll try more or less dissolved sugar one of these days.
In the meantime, these cookies were pretty tasty. I can't say they were anywhere near as good as those maple-cookies from earlier, and my mother, who is a chocolate-peanut fanatic, thought they were good but didn't seem especially thrilled. They certainly came out much better than the previous run, though--they felt more like a cookie than a rather soft rock, and they tasted more like a cookie than a heavily salted spoonful of peanut butter.
Tune in next week (or sooner) for another round of tests, and the return of the amazing vegan maple cookie.
