While I love a straight forward chocolate chip cookie, I find myself pairing chocolate with warm spices this time of year. These molasses chocolate chip cookies are soft, spicy, and just a touch chewy.
Confession time: I am semi-secretly a food science nerd. Last year, I borrowed Shirley Corriher’s Bakewise from my local public library. Most days, if you ask me what I remember about that book, my vision will flood red and my inner editor will seethe with pure and unfettered rage, but to be honest, I did learn a thing or two about food science. It probably wasn’t worth suffering through five hundred and fifty pages of brand loyalty, animal product worship, and absolutely mind-numbing repetition, but such are the sacrifices one must make to become a better baker in this day and age. (Seriously though, don’t even thinking about reading that book cover to cover without a bottle of migraine medicine at your side. You’ve been warned!)
In any event, Shirley gave me plenty of food for thought (ha! ha!) about playing with structure and texture in baked goods. While I love the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of an oil-based cookie, I’ve been incorporating a lot of solid fats, molasses, and bread flour into my baked goods lately, and I have to say I’m really enthused with the results. For starters, the acid in molasses reacts with baking soda, giving whatever you’re making an animal-friendly leavening boost — not to mention the fact that it deepens the flavors of chocolate and peanut butter! Creaming your sugar with a solid fat (like vegan buttery spread, shortening, and coconut oil) is an easy way to keep your cookies from getting too flat, and the added protein in bread flour lends a little extra structure and chew. I can’t get enough!
My all-purpose molasses cookies are simple, spicy, thin, and chewy, but this recipe makes a more substantial cookie. These are genuinely toothsome, with crisp edges and soft, melt-in-your-mouth middles, and are just as wonderful fresh out of the oven as they are the following day. With all the spices of a classic molasses cookie, plus two forms of chocolate, these cookies have loads of flavor, too.
- ¾ c + 2 Tbsp granulated sugar
- 7 Tbsp vegan butter, softened
- 3 Tbsp blackstrap molasses
- ½ tsp vanilla extract
- ¾ c bread flour
- ½ c all-purpose flour
- 1 Tbsp cocoa powder
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- ½ tsp ground cloves
- ½ tsp ground ginger
- ½ tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp salt
- ¾ c vegan chocolate chips
- Preheat oven to 350F.
- In a large bowl, cream together sugar, vegan butter, and molasses.
- Beat in vanilla extract.
- In a small bowl, sift together flours, cocoa, spices, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
- Beat flour mixture into sugar mixture. The dough will be stiff.
- Fold in chocolate chips.
- Form dough into 2″ balls and bake on a silicone baking mat or cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, 3″ apart, for 8-10 minutes.
- Allow to cool on cookie sheet 2-3 minutes before transferring to cooling racks or counter.
- Best enjoyed warm.
12 comments
Johanna says:
Feb 18, 2013
Hmmmm…one must make these when almost all of the ingredients are already in the house. I have whole wheat bread flour, so they’ll be a little healthy. I just have to get chocolate chips. Thanks!
Linda says:
Feb 18, 2013
I love anything with molasses in it, and I just so happen to love chocolate chip cookies too!
Johanna says:
Feb 18, 2013
What I loved was the liquidy molasses taste. I also used whole wheat bread flour and cake flour.
Christine says:
Feb 19, 2013
I’ve been lurking your blog for a while, but I’m finally commenting! =] These sound great! I’m going through a chocolate moment right now and I think that my students will love these, too. When they’re good I bake for them.
claryn says:
Feb 22, 2013
Aw, thanks Christine! Nice to see you around here, and uh, seriously, you sound like the. best. teacher.
Johanna says:
Feb 22, 2013
They are wonderful! Actually using the molasses and not brown sugar makes them melt in your mouth.
claryn says:
Feb 23, 2013
Yes, totally! Glad you like them, Johanna
Johanna says:
Feb 19, 2013
2nd batch being baked today…those who ate some of the first want more.
Lindsay @ VeganYumminess says:
Feb 20, 2013
Ohhh….these look amazing, Claryn! I love what you said about Bakewise. LOL…I often find myself ‘proofreading’ other peoples’ books; Not so much for content, but for grammar. I graded grammar as a job in highschool, and I’ve never quite left it. I’m trying to leave those days behind by making purposeful grammar errors when I blog and comment. But, (i.e., starting out a sentence with “But”:o)I annoy myself terribly everytime I do it.
Kristina says:
Mar 14, 2013
My husband loved these! I replaced the vegan butter with coconut oil and used some agave in place of the sugar. The spicey aroma paired with chocolate was just wonderful! I was hoping these treats would last a while (I doubled the recipe) but there is a cookie monster in this house!
Amber says:
May 18, 2013
I’m a professional baker and decided to try this recipe out as my first foray into vegan baking
The only issue (albeit a kind of big one), was with the texture of my cookies. Where the flavor of these cookies was MAGNIFICENT, the texture was pretty dry. I substituted coconut oil for the vegan margarine, because I happened to have some on hand. I’ve read other articles stating that this was an acceptable substitution, but is that where I went wrong? I also pre-made the dough and refrigerated it for a few hours before baking. The dough was pretty dry and crumbly.
Also, the cookies didn’t really spread. They pretty much maintained the same ball shape that I had formed before baking.
Sorry for all the questions- I just really want to get these right because they seem delightful, and I want to be successful at vegan baking.
Thanks!
claryn says:
Jun 1, 2013
This dough is on the drier side, but it definitely shouldn’t be crumbly! Though I’m sure you’ve already considered this, it’s possible we measure flour differently, and I could see how a couple of tablespoons of extra flour might make it difficult to work with. More likely, though, is that your hunch is correct and the coconut oil was the culprit. I haven’t made this recipe with coconut oil myself, and while I’m sure there’s a way to make it work, it is definitely not exactly the same as vegan margarine. At room temperature, it’s much harder than margarine, and it also melts at a much higher temperature. One result is that even if you creamed the sugar into melted coconut oil and had a nice wet mixture to stir your dry mixture into, coconut oil hardens very quickly once room-temperature flour is added to it, which in many cases makes for a dry dough. Also, while making the dough in advance does usually improve the texture of cookies, did you let the dough return to room temperature before baking it? If not, it might have needed more time in the oven to spread. Hope that helps!