Congratulations, you just stumbled upon the best vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe on the internet. My famous vegan cookies are just the right amount of doughy with a perfectly caramelised outside and a good old handful of semi-sweet chocolate chips thrown in. They’re chunky, soft and crinkly — all finished off with a delicate sprinkle of sea salt.

I used to sell them in my coffee truck and boy oh boy did people love them! They had their own fan club. A small following. And they came in different varieties, too, that I will share with you over time. Legend has it people have crossed oceans to get their hands on one of these cookies. Or at least crossed all of London. And I know for a fact that there are people out there who have been waiting for me to publish the recipe since the day the coffee truck closed doors. So today, finally, the time has come.

Whether you’ve been waiting for this or not, I hope you’ll give my recipe a try and will love the result as much as I do.

Ingredients

For 10 large cookies

150g coconut oil (at room temperature)

330g light soft brown sugar

70g oat milk or other milk alternative (unsweetened)

80g apple sauce (unsweetened)

410g plain white flour

1 heaped tsp salt (9g)

2 tsp baking soda (9g)

180g chocolate chips (54% cocoa)

Notes on ingredients

Method

Step 1 Cream your soft brown sugar and coconut oil in a mixing bowl until smooth. I like to use a stand mixer on medium speed. If your coconut oil is on the firmer side, this step might take some time. Make sure you whisk the ingredients until all the bits have dissolved and you end up with a homogenous mixture.

Step 2 Now, add the oat milk and apple sauce into the mixing bowl and whisk on medium to high speed for two minutes or until the batter is smooth. Don’t worry if your batter looks split at this stage. This might be due to the temperature and texture of your coconut oil or the amount of liquid in the apple sauce. Adding flour in the next step will fix the broken batter.

Step 3 In a separate bowl, thoroughly mix your dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt) with a wire whisk.

Step 4 Introduce the dry mixture to the wet batter and beat until well incorporated. Try to do this quickly so as not to overmix. Your dough should be very thick and will stick to the sides of your mixing bowl.

Step 5 Add the chocolate chips and mix on high speed to incorporate them quickly. This should be a matter of a few seconds only. Again, you don’t want to overmix.

Step 6 Pre-heat your oven to 175ºC (fan.)

Step 7 Time to get your cookie dough ready for baking! I like to use a wet tablespoon measure to scoop small balls of dough onto a baking sheet and squish them onto each other. The cookies are supposed to be super thick and chunky so I pile the dough high — roughly three tablespoon measures of dough (or around 120g) per cookie. Wetting the spoon in between scoops ensures the dough doesn’t stick to it and comes onto the baking sheet easily. For a regular-sized baking tray, I recommend no more than six cookies per sheet. In this case — because we’re making ten cookies — go for two sheets of baking paper with five cookies each.

Step 8 Now it’s time to bake. Place one baking tray on the medium rack and the other on the lower rack. Once your cookies are in the oven turn the heat down to 170ºC and bake between 12 and 15 minutes — or until they’ve developed a nice golden brown colour. In my oven, the sweet spot is 13 minutes, but no two ovens are the same so do keep an eye and adjust the baking time accordingly. I recommend swapping the baking trays halfway through as well as turning each by 180 degrees to ensure an even bake (this might not be necessary in your oven.)

Step 9 When you’re satisfied with the look of your cookies, take them out of the oven and finish them off with a sprinkle of Maldon salt or any other coarse sea salt. There’s already quite a bit of salt in the dough, so don’t overdo it. Then leave to cool on a wire rack.

Step 10 The cookies will be very soft while they’re warm but will firm up nicely over time. If you’re in a warm climate, or making this recipe during the summer, this might take a while. Once cooled down, you can pop them in the fridge to help them firm up and keep them fresh — it works a treat. If you’re not one to wait around, I highly recommend trying them fresh out of the oven with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream. You’re welcome!

Notes on Ingredients

Apple Sauce

Using apple sauce in this recipe ensures that all ingredients hold together — it replaces the eggs in a classic cookie recipe and works as a binder. When using store-bought apple sauce, I recommend opting for the unsweetened type since the cookies are already quite sweet. One example of unsweetened apple sauce in the UK is Biona Organic Apple Puree. If this isn’t available at your local supermarket, I recommend you make own apple sauce, following my recipe for Simple Vegan Apple Sauce, which is the one I always use.

Chocolate Chips

I prefer semisweet chocolate chips (meaning dark chocolate with less than 50% sugar) in my cookies because they prevent them from becoming too sickly sweet. But they’re still sweet enough to melt in your mouth as chocolate should and to balance out the saltiness. I also recommend bigger chocolate chunks rather than chips for this recipe, but that’s really down to personal preference.

My go-to chocolate for baking is Callebaut 811 with 54.5% cocoa, which is vegan, halal and gluten-free. Taste and texture are far superior to anything you find at the supermarket and it even comes up cheaper if you buy it in bulk online. Good quality chocolate really makes the difference!

I have also used Dr Oetker Jumbo Choc Chips Dark in this recipe, which work beautifully but are somewhat hard to find. If you can’t find suitable chocolate chips in your local supermarket, you could chop up any semi-sweet chocolate bar to make your own chocolate chunks. A dark vegan chocolate that’s readily available in the UK is Dr Oetker 54% Dark Chocolate for Bakers.

Coconut Oil

While coconut oil is usually solid at room temperature, it liquifies quite quickly when the temperature rises above 25ºC. For best results with this recipe, it’s important to work with solid coconut oil that’s soft enough to easily blend with the sugar. If, like me, you live in the UK, this should hardly be an issue except maybe during the three days of summer we get. However, if you absolutely must make my cookies during a heatwave or if you live in a warmer climate, I highly recommend taking the time to make your coconut oil workable so you end up with the best possible results:

If your coconut oil is liquid to start with, pop it in the fridge to firm up until it’s white and of a more solid consistency. For me, the texture was workable after about one hour, but the amount of time it takes will depend on your brand of coconut oil as well as the temperature of your fridge. Don’t worry if the centre is still liquid as long as most of the oil you’re using is thick and not runny in texture.

If you keep your oil in the fridge for too long, it will become completely solid and will be difficult to get out of the jar. In this case, you might want to take it out of the fridge and wait for it to soften again. When in doubt or short on time, I recommend working with coconut oil that’s a bit too firm rather than too soft. If you use very soft or even liquid coconut oil, you will end up with a runny batter and oily cookies — and nobody wants that!

If you’re not impressed by the idea of coconut flavour in your chocolate chip cookies, you could opt for refined coconut oil, which has a milder, almost neutral scent and flavour. But please note that I have not tested the recipe with refined coconut oil and I suspect it might leave the cookies lacking in flavour.

Plant milk

I like to use oat milk in most of my baking because I like the flavour and it’s simply what I have on hand most of the time. It’s also the only plant milk I’ve tried in this recipe. You could substitute oat milk for your preferred milk alternative as long as it’s unsweetened and subtle in flavour, such as soya, almond, cashew or even pea milk.

Sugar

The perfect soft and chewy texture of these cookies largely relies on the type of sugar used. For this recipe, I have only ever tried light soft brown sugar specifically, but I imagine you could opt for dark brown sugar, like dark Muscovado, as long as it’s the soft, moist type. Just note that there will likely be a difference in taste — the higher the amount of molasses in the sugar, the richer and deeper the flavour.

If soft brown sugar is not available where you live, you can easily make your own. Simply mix 200g white sugar with 1 tbsp molasses. This can be done by hand or in a stand mixer.

Mighty Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies