Chocolate Chip Homemade Cashew Butter Cookies Recipe (Vegan, Paleo, Flourless, Oil-Free) (2024)

FAQs

Is it better to use butter or oil in chocolate chip cookies? ›

Indeed, cookies made with butter are usually softer and more tender than those made with oils. And last but not least, butter in cookies helps achieve that perfect texture. That's because butter melts at a lower temperature than other fats, allowing cookies to spread evenly while baking.

Animal ingredients in cookies

Butter and eggs are the most common animal products found in cookies. In addition to butter, dairy can also make its way into store-bought cookies in the form of whey. While not as common, there are a number of boxed cookies that use honey for added sweetness.

When I make chocolate chip cookies, why don't the chocolate chips melt in the oven? Cooking chocolate tends to have less cocoa butter than eating chocolate, which raises the cooking chocolate's melting temperature and makes it more difficult to melt. However, the chocolate will still melt in the oven.

Replacing Butter with Oil

Depending on the type of oil, it can add complex flavor and welcome moisture to your baked goods. A good rule of thumb is to replace about 3/4 of the butter in a recipe with olive, canola, or vegetable oil. (If the recipe calls for 1 cup butter, use ¾ cup oil.)

The milk solids in butter create a flavor that's hard to beat. It brings a little extra deliciousness to almost any recipe. If you don't eat dairy, or you're just looking for a different flavor, you can also substitute oil for butter in most recipes, but it's important to keep flavor in mind.

Applesauce and mashed bananas

Both of these fruits can be used as a partial substitute for vegetable oil in baked goods. We don't recommend a full swap — try half fruit and half oil or butter — for the best results.

In baking, you can use vegan butter, applesauce, dairy-free yogurt, coconut oil, coconut butter, olive oil, nut butter, mashed banana and mashed avocado. In cooking, you can use olive oil, coconut oil, vegetable stock, or avocado oil to replace butter.

Depending on the recipe, and more specifically how much refined sugars they contain vegan cookies probably aren't the healthiest option when it comes to a sweet treat. Opting for a recipe that uses natural fruit-sugars to sweeten them could be the healthiest option.

Why can't you eat vegan cookie dough? ›

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.

In the case of chocolate chip cookies, though, you can definitely use them interchangeably. You'll notice the chocolate chips will be mostly be intact, while the chopped baking chocolate often melts into lovely little puddles of chocolate onto the cookie. Either way, you will almost always end up with a tasty treat!

Cookies become hard when the moisture in them evaporates. This can be caused by leaving them out in the air for too long, baking them for too long, or storing them improperly. The lack of moisture makes the cookies hard and dry, which makes them difficult to enjoy.

Plus there's something to be said for the integrity and texture of the final product. If you add too many chocolate chips they might all merge into one big chocolate ball and become too dense or just cause the whole thing to fall apart.

Using melted butter in cookies helps you achieve a similar fudgy-yet-cooked texture and prevents any unwanted cakiness. Instead of the rise coming from both chemical and physical leavening agents (baking soda/powder + creamed butter), it now comes almost exclusively from chemical agents alone.

Also, underbaking them by a minute or 2 will help them retain a dense, chewy bite, explains Jenny McCoy, pastry baking arts chef-instructor at the Institute for Culinary Education in New York. Adding more moisture to your dough in the form of extra butter, egg yolks, or brown sugar will make your cookies even softer.

Which One Should I Use in Cookies? Basically, cookies made with butter spread more and are flatter and crisper if baked long enough. However, they are more flavorful than cookies made with shortening. Cookies made with shortening bake up taller and are more tender, but aren't as flavorful.

Most cookie recipes call for beating room-temperature butter. At a temperature between 70 and 72 degrees F, butter is soft enough to incorporate air, but not so soft that it will melt immediately in the oven and result in super-thin cookies.