Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (2024)

FAQs

Why are my vegan chocolate chip cookies flat? ›

Why are my vegan cookies flat? Likely because you flattened the cookies before baking them. Make sure you have nice round balls of dough on your cookie sheet and do not flatten them at all. If you did this and you still find your cookies are a bit flat, it is likely due to the vegan butter brand you are using.

One of the standout benefits of plant-based and vegan cookies is the significant reduction in saturated fats and cholesterol. Traditional cookie recipes often incorporate butter and eggs, which contribute to higher levels of saturated fats and cholesterol.

The most common mistake with peanut butter cookies is using the wrong type of peanut butter. The BEST peanut butter for today's cookies is a processed creamy peanut butter, preferably Jif or Skippy.

Try using baking powder instead of baking soda. Baking soda encourages spreading while baking powder puffs the cookies up. If your recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, you would use 3 to 4 teaspoons of baking powder. Caution: This could result in an unwanted flavor shift.

If you think vegan baked goods are dry and crumbly, you probably haven't had one that's been made with the right fat (or the right amount of fat), according to Konya. Butter is what makes traditional baked goods so darn tasty—as well as helps keep it all together—so you can't merely eliminate it and hope for the best.

Vegan diets have also been shown to help in the treatment of type 2 diabetes by lowering total and LDL cholesterol and by controlling lipid levels, for example by reducing triglycerides, a type of fat that is also associated with a greater risk of heart disease (Jenkins et al.

Raw Flour Is Unsafe to Eat—Here's Why

Because of this assumption, flour isn't typically treated to kill bacteria, putting it in the same category as raw meat or uncooked eggs. Similar to raw eggs, flour can harbor Salmonella as well as E. coli.1 Like Salmonella, E. coli is often transmitted through animal waste.

Over time, your skin loses its volume and its youthfulness. A vegan diet tends to be higher in antioxidants and other nutrients that have anti-inflammatory properties. These are linked to better health and brighter, more glowing skin.

This may not sound like a lot, but it is enough that it can affect the quality of your cookies – adding too much peanut butter can make them dry, hard, and crumbly.

Why do you smash peanut butter cookies? ›

It's been the “mark” of this classic treat for more than eighty years, and for good reason: by flattening this dense cookie dough, it ensures that each cookie bakes evenly. Our kitchen-tested recipe is a classic.

Your other source of fat should be butter, not shortening. Butter will make your cookies taste buttery; shortening will make them taste suspiciously vacant, like Katy Perry's voice post-autotune. Yes, shortening yields chewier cookies than butter does, because butter contains water and shortening doesn't.

OVEN IS TOO HOT

If your cookies consistently come out flat, you may have selected the wrong baking temperature. If you bake cookies using too much heat, the fats in the dough begin to melt before the other ingredients can cook together and form your cookie's rise.

If the cookies spread too much, you can usually fix the problem by adding more flour or oatmeal, or less liquid. If you notice it when the first batch goes into / comes out of the oven, a tablespoon of flour added may make the rest of the batch just right. If they spread, your cookies dough doesn't have enough flour.

Cookies made with melted butter often deflate and become denser when they cool, resulting in a perfectly cooked fudgy center — a similar textural result to brownies that get rapped (aka banged against an oven rack mid-bake to deflate them) or Sarah Kieffer's iconic pan-banging cookies that turn out pleasantly compact.