Being a competent home cook and baker has its perks. One of which is the ability to feed my love ones with food they enjoy, vegan or not. Last Friday I had dinner with my best friend from grade 7. We’ve been through a lot since and I feel blessed that we remain close friends to this day. She has always love animals so it’s no surprise that she’s now fully embracing the vegan lifestyle. I baked her two batches of vegan cookies as a small gesture. The cookies you see on the left are Lemon Poppy Seed Spelt Thins and the cookies on the right are Cinnamon Chipotle Chocolate Cookies.
A few years ago I experimented with vegan baking and had great success with Dreena Burton’s recipes. The basic recipe is making a dough using quickbread method with oil, maple syrup, and a bit of molasses for flavour. All ingredients are standard pantry staples yet the result is tender cookies that rival their non-vegan counterpart. The best part is the ease of the recipes. I can typically bake a whole batch within 30 minutes from the time I scale out the ingredients to cookies cooling on the rack, clean up included!
I adapted her recipe for Chocolate Chunk Spice Cookies from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan to create these Cinnamon Chipotle Chocolate Cookies. The combination is inspired by traditional Mexican chocolate spicing. The heat from chipotle is quite subtle at first bite but slowly creeps up to you for a nice warm finish. It is balanced with the sweet cinnamon and of course rich chocolate.
If you want to forgo baking these cookies yourself, they are available as part of my vegan cookie assortment in my bake sale fundraiser! Order deadline is August 28, 2011.
Cinnamon Chipotle Chocolate Cookies
makes 14 cookies
Ingredients
- 65g granulated sugar
- 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp ground chipotle
- 100g all-purpose flour
- 3 tbsp Dutched cocoa powder
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 85mL maple syrup
- 70mL grape seed oil or other flavourless oil
- 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips
Method
- Preheat oven to 350F. Line one 11x17 baking sheet with parchment paper.
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together sugar, salt, cinnamon, chipotle, flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and baking soda.
- In a small mixing bowl, whisk together maple syrup and oil until homogenous.
- Pour oil mixture into dry mixture and fold gently just until combined. Fold in dark chocolate chips.
- Scoop out mounds of dough about the size of 1 tablespoon and spaced evenly on prepared baking sheet. Bake for 12 minutes until the edges feel set. The centre would be soft. Let the cookie sit on the baking sheet for another 5 minutes until they are sturdy enough to move to cooling rack. Cookies keep well in airtight container for up to 5 days.
