Vegan Gluten Free Cookies- Copycat Toll House Cookie Recipe

 

This post technically began a little over 8 months ago. Creating and perfecting this recipe has been a labour of baking love like no other. To all of the INCREDIBLY patient followers on my Instagram, thank-you! You’ve tolerated near daily posts and stories about my journey into creating these totally vegan gluten free cookies. I went a step further and made these vegan chocolate chip cookies nut free, refined sugar free and Toll House style! This vegan Toll House cookie recipe is everything I hoped it would be. Soft, super tasty and doesn’t taste like gritty hippie food. You have watched me squeal with delight, every time a recipe got that much better. You might have even witnessed the dozen or so batches be tossed with unadulterated rage, into the trash bin (only to have my 10 year old son have a total melt-down, “MOM, NO! I would still eat those!!!”).

It all began so innocently. Every Thursday at the boys’ football practice, we would do a tailgate of sorts. Really, it was more like a weekly potluck and excuse for us to all eat a second dinner. I had been bringing no bake vegan protein bars and energy balls but noticing a lack of homemade treats, I thought it might be nice to bring in a tray of warm baked vegan gluten free cookies. And so began the Toll House cookie recipe! I am a lot things, but a natural baker is not one of them. Stove-top cooking comes really easy to me (thank the Gods of culinary skills for that one!) and puts me in an as-close-to meditative state as my ADHD-esk body will allow. To me, cooking is an art and a baking is science. Two of my favorite subjects.

Up until last July, I can honestly say that I had never, ever made vegan gluten free cookies from scratch. Never. Ever. So back to my clearly overly confident idea to “just whip up two-dozen cookies.” I had recipe searched for a few days leading up to the tailgate and quickly realized this was going to be tougher than anticipated. Firstly, just our family alone couldn’t consume dairy, eggs or gluten. There were also serious nut allergies within the group, so that abolished more than half of the decent looking options. At this point, I had a mere 24 hours to figure out a recipe, only to read that the best chocolate chip cookie dough should spend an evening chilling out in the fridge. Fantastic (insert bitter sarcasm). I had thought of abandoning the idea entirely. The Toll House cookie recipe on the verge of being scrapped. It was causing totally unjustified stress and seemed ridiculous that making vegan gluten free cookies was consuming this much of my time and head space. But as a big believer in constant self-analyzing, I began to understand why this situation was causing me a preposterous amount of grief. I was afraid. Legit super-duper afraid of failing. In hindsight, even typing that makes me role my proverbial eyes. The truth is, I am laced with Type-A traits and a perfectionist of sorts. The thought of going through all the effort to buy ingredients (after 8 months of trial and error, my bank account is totally bitter towards me), make the mess of putting them together, chilling the dough for 12 hours, shaping 24 little balls onto a parchment lined tray, baking them for 15 minutes, letting them cool on a rack you had to buy because you didn’t even own one, only to have them taste like thick spherical sandpaper cookie doppelgangers, seemed all too terrifying for me. Luckily, my inner wimp got bullied into giving it a go. Armed with about 7 different recipes ( only some of them were vegan gluten free cookies. Most were traditional and contained plenty of dairy, eggs and other stuff we couldn’t eat) and $52 worth of baking ingredients, I began my soon-to-be 8 month journey into creating the world’s best wannabe Toll House cookie recipe!

Have you ever sat on your kitchen floor with your hands and faced pressed against the glass door of your oven, praying to any God that’s willing to listen? No? Well, you have a lot more faith in your baking abilities than I do. After putting together the closest thing to a Toll House cookie recipe that I was partially confident “might” work, I popped them into the oven and decided to observe their every second under the pressure of 350 degrees. Now, I may not have baked from scratch before, but I am no stranger to store-bought dough and know that cookies go through quite the metamorphosis on their journey from dough to cookies. The fact that this batch of vegan gluten free cookies had not budged during it’s 15 minutes in the oven, was the first telltale sign things were only going downhill from there. I let them cool before taking the most unsatisfying bite of cookie I had ever endured. Although they certainly weren’t the worst I had ever eaten, they weren’t even close to what I had hoped and planned for. The thought of serving 24 of these to some of my most favorite people on the planet was painful.

We rolled up to the practice field and I placed my big Rubbermaid of “cookies” on the table. There was plenty of excitement surrounding the giant container of warm treats, which I would promptly reply with something in the tune of, “Please don’t be too excited, they’re not very good. They’re vegan gluten free chocolate chip cookies and… well, just not very good.” I could feel people writing me off as humble, so I made sure to make uncomfortably intense and near desperate eye contact. Really driving home the fact that these were not anywhere near my standard. All I could do after that, was watch on as the Rubbermaid container quickly emptied and hands quickly filled. I’ll spare you on the details of how I pretended to walk the field “socializing,” while really using this time to spy on people eating the cookies. I wanted to see their knee-jerk, honest reactions. Thankfully, no “cookie” went uneaten, but sadly all the compliments went something like:

– “Kris did you make these scones? They’re great!”

– “Mmm, chocolate chip biscuits?! Yum!”

– “These are pretty good for vegan and gluten-free.”

From that point forward, I knew things I never wanted to hear again. These included, but were not limited to:

– Your cookies taste like scones.

– Your cookies taste like biscuits.

– Your cookies are ONLY palatable because they are free from everything that normally makes a cookie taste like a cookie.

Bless my husband, and his seemingly infinite patience with the neurosis that is the essence of who I am. That night in bed, I walked that poor man through my every thought from the past 4 hours and how I plan to tackle this vegan gluten free cookie war I had now wagged on myself. I made him swear to me that he would be highly critical and give me honest feedback on every cookie I was about to stuff into him, from now into the unforeseeable future. He gave me his word, rolled over and went to sleep. I rolled over, turned down the brightness of my iPhone and proceeded to Google the basics of vegan gluten free chocolate chip cookie making for the following 2 hours. I had to master the Toll House cookie recipe!

I woke up the next morning armed with a passion to learn. I would start from the very basic fundamentals of how cookies had traditionally been made and then educate myself silly on the challenges and techniques of vegan gluten free cookie baking. For the next 5 days, I stayed glued to my laptop. My Google and Youtube history looked something like this:

– Cookies baking in slow motion

– Why do my cookies taste like scones?

– How to make gluten-free cookies better?

– Really good vegan cookies WITHOUT nut butter

If there is a cookie rabbit hole to plummet down, plummet down I did.

The next tailgate was quickly approaching and I had put together a new and improved vegan gluten free Toll House cookie recipe, that I was confident would be better than the last. Although it wasn’t anywhere close to a victory, it was a small improvement from the previous week and that was enough steam to keep the engine going. Week after week, I would tweak the recipe slightly, while posting all of the wins and loses on my Instagram story. I kid you not, having an online community of people that were actually following and commenting on my daily kitchen battles, really kept me focused on my ridiculous goal of creating the world’s best vegan gluten free, nut-free Toll House cookie recipe. If you were one of those people, thank-you SO dang much!

Summer turned to fall, fall turned to winter and I was finally at a point where the ingredient tweaks were minuscule and many super yummy vegan gluten free cookies had successfully been created and consumed. During the month of December, I had also decided that refined sugar didn’t belong in the Toll House cookie recipe and it should be replaced with something more nutrient dense. That’s a simple swap, you might say to yourself. Well, that would make you very wrong. This altered the recipe in horrible, terrible ways and added easily six additional weeks onto recipe completion. However, with some (very expensive and time devouring) trial and error, I was able to find a great substitute and balance the recipe back out.

Without further ado, I offer the internet an actual chunk of my life. 8 months of research, sourcing, mixing, chilling, shaping, baking, cooling and testing, for literally THE best modern day vegan gluten free Toll House cookies you will ever eat.

Hardcore Disclaimers:

– Ovens are mostly evil liars and I strongly suggest you purchase a good quality oven thermometer.

– ONLY use Earth Balance. I still get night sweats thinking about the nightmare-ish cookies created from other brands.

– It is vital that once cooled, these be stored in a tightly sealed container at room temperature. Cookies will stay fresh for up to 5 days.

 

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Copycat Toll House Style Cookies - Vegan, Gluten-free & Refined Sugar Free

The famous classic chocolate chip American cookie, made modern.
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 12 minutes
Total Time 5 hours 22 minutes
Course Dessert
Cuisine COOKIES, DESSERTS
Servings 10 cookies

Ingredients
  

  • 1 tbsp ground chia
  • 3 tbsp water
  • 1/3 cup melted butter - I used Earth Balance
  • 1/4 cup melted refined coconut oil
  • 1 cup coconut sugar
  • 1/3 cup full fat coconut milk
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 2 cups 1 for 1 Gluten-Free Flour - I used Bob's Red Mill
  • 1 tbsp cornstarch
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp sea salt
  • 1/2 cup chopped dark chocolate chunks - I used Enjoy Life Foods
  • 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Instructions
 

  • In a small bowl, mix together the chia and water. Allow to sit, while you prep the wet ingredients.
  • Add sugar to melted butter and mix well. Follow with chia, vanilla and coconut milk and mix until well blended.
  • In a separate bowl, mix flour, cornstarch, salt, baking powder and baking soda together.
  • Slowly add dry ingredients into wet ingredients and mix very well, stirring with wooden spoon or sturdy spatula for about 3 minutes. If you have a Kitchen Aid with paddle attachment, mix on low for 2 minutes.
  • Fold in chocolate chips and chopped chocolate chunks.
  • Cover dough very well (air is it's worst enemy!) and chill in the fridge for 5-8 hours.
  • Once chilled, pre-heat oven to 375 degrees and line a good quality baking sheet with parchment paper.
  • Using an ice cream scoop (I use a kitchen scale and measure each dough ball out to 69 grams each) for consistent size and shape, scoop out dough and roll into balls and flatten to about 1/2 - 1 inch thickness. (I simply place each ball onto the baking sheet and lightly press down using the palm of my hand)
  • Bake for 12-15 minutes, until the exterior is fairly firm to the touch.
  • Once removed from the oven, leave on the baking sheet for 5 minutes. Cookies will continue to bake and firm up enough to safely remove from tray.
  • Remove and let cool on baking racks for about 15 minutes.
  • Transfer to airtight container.

Notes

*Cookies are good at room temperature for up to 5 days.
**These are best enjoyed served warmed. Pop in the microwave for 10 seconds each (every microwave varies!) or in an oven at 350 degree for 2-3 minutes.
***Cookies freeze so perfectly!!! Store in airtight container and freeze up to 6-8 weeks. Thaw at room temperature.
Keyword school friendly, vegan dessert

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