How to Make Delicious Vegan Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

• The best Chocolate Chip Cookies, as large as saucers!
• E asy Vegan Shortbread
• Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
• Levain-style Cookies
• Tangy Lemon Cookies

There is nothing more comforting than vegan chocolate chip oatmeal cookies: they taste so much better when they're vegan. There a lot of vegan oatmeal cookie recipes out there, but this one is particularly delicious.

What hopes do you have for 2021? I'm imagining that they are less grandiose than we normally start the new year with. Covid-19 has been an incredibly sobering, frustrating and devastating illness but at times it has made many of us stop and reassess what we are doing with our lives.

I used to love spending every spare minute cooking. I pickled Piccalili, I stirred-up on Sunday, I glaced marons, I candied peel and I’m pretty sure I even brandied quinces. I did all this whilst working full-time and blogged about it every day too, hundreds of words at a time!

Where did I find the energy? Fourteen years ago, I was a housewife, working in a dull office, living in a tiny unrenovated terrace cottage, thinking all the time about cooking and baking. If I found a recipe at lunchtime I liked, I’d be cooking it by 7pm that night.

These days I’m a little more careful, a bit more considerate with my time and what I cook. I was known amongst the blogging community as an adventurous cook, and I made such interesting delicacies as pigs head, trotters, goat, laverbread. Anything weird (for the early 2000s at least) I could find, I would cook it. As most of you know, I am pretty much entirely plant-based now, although I do still eat the odd piece of cheese or milk chocolate. I like to cook food I know I’ll enjoy, I want to spend my time on yummy not weird.

Although my brain still conjures up crazy ideas apace, my medication is a timely reminder that I need to sometimes step back and assess things before I jump. Cooking is less impromptu for me now, and I find I need to plan more, and muster up a bit more energy than I did in those hedonistic pig-trotter days. My medication also reminds me that I don’t have to do everything at breakneck speed (although the idea that every minute needs to be utilised in a functional manner will never leave me), and that cooking is a hobby, a love: a love to be savoured and enjoyed.

These holidays I baked cookies. Nothing flashy, just Oatmeal Cookies, some chocolate, some raisin. Of course, I’ve photographed them (food is art too!), and will share the results with you. I baked some Linzer Cookies, which I love, and the texture is challenging for the vegan cook. I also made some Florentines, their delicious chewy, poshness woo everyone at Christmas or if you give them as a gift.

I have also been working on a very special vegan cookbook, just cookies, and just one dough. You will be able to subscribe to that shortly and, best of all, it's free! It's a thank you for everyone's ongoing support for this little foodie blog. For now, enjoy the photos that I spent some time on, but more importantly please: read on to see how to make delicious vegan chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.

My hope for 2021, (the C-word aside), is to work on my photography skills, and accept that my Instagram or blog or Pinterest will never be as perfectly curated as many of those beautiful, aspirational accounts I follow, but will instead be a reflection of me: eclectic, happy, sad, tired, energetic, excitable, changeable, bored, in love with life, out of love with life, inspired, expired. The feed (and food!) of a 40-something (ahem) year old who has lived and learnt to be herself.

Of course, my best vegan oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are simply delicious, comforting, homely cookies, filled with old fashioned oats, sometimes (in this case) vegan chocolate chips and often walnuts or raisins. They have a chew middle and crispy edges: the perfect texture for a cookie.

They are a drop cookie, which means no moulding or rolling. They have a quick baking time so you can have a batch ready almost as soon as the craving has hit. Simple and yummy.

This recipe uses simple ingredients that we all have in our store cupboard.

• Oats or oatmeal. I like to use old-fashioned rolled oats but you can use quick oats. You could also use steel cut oats but they do have a coarser texture, so the overall cookie may be a little denser.
• Soft brown sugar and white sugar. One adds flavour and chewiness, the other adds a deeper sweetness and crispness. You could use coconut sugar instead.
• Flour. I use plain flour, you could use gluten free all purpose flour, or even oat flour for an additional oaty hit!
• Baking Powder
• Vegan Butter: use your favourite brand.
• Maple Syrup. Again this adds texture and chewy texture to the cookie, along with it's distinctive flavour.
• Flax egg made with ½ tablespoon ground flaxseed whisked up with 1 tablespoon water.
• Vanilla Extract. I can't think of any vegan cookies that don't use vanilla extract!
• Dairy-free Chocolate Chips, vegan
• Walnuts (optional)

• In a large mixing bowl whisk the flour, salt and baking powder.
• Stir in one cup of the oatmeal.
• In a blender, whizz up the sugars and remaining oatmeal.
• Using a hand whisk, stand mixer or electric mixer, blend butter and maple syrup in a large bowl for a couple of minutes.
• In two lots, add the dry ingredients of flour, salt, baking powder and unprocessed oatmeal.
• Then mix in the flax egg, vanilla and sugar/oatmeal blended mixture.
• Fold in the chocolate chips and walnuts (if using).
• You will have a very stiff cookie dough. Note: if dough seems too thick or you still have patches of flour showing (you shouldn't), add a little almond milk or non-dairy milk.
• Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
• Using a cookie scoop or spoon, scoop dough, dropping them onto the baking tray. You can make larger or small cookies, depending on how many you want to make.
• Side note: If you want your cookies to be a little more uniform, lightly dust your hands with flour, and roll between your hands into cookie dough balls.
• Gently flatten cookies a little.
• Bake cookies for between 10-12 minutes or until lightly golden brown.
• Leave to stand for a minute before placing on a wire rack to cool.
• These will keep for 7-10 days in an airtight container

Yes you can make the dough the night before: cover dough in the bowl with clingfilm and refrigerate.

Yes! Wrap tightly in clingfilm, then place in a ziplock bag and freeze for up to 2 months.