Sadly, not brought to you in Smell-o-Vision



I hope my reading audience will forgive the slight blurriness of the picture, in light of the content of said picture. :)

I've wanted to bake up a batch of dairy-free chocolate chip cookies since Monday — which is unsurprisingly when I realized I had no dairy-free desserts in the house. I must have been influenced by the mouth-watering chocolate chip cookies episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay. Levain Bakery's cookies look just fantastic. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself.

I researched many copycat recipes online and found myself overwhelmed by the choices. In the end, I settled on a non-copycat recipe, referred to simply (and not humbly) as The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie.

I made a double-batch of dough, replacing the butter for my vegan margarine and substituting in half trans-fat-free shortening as well, to prevent the dough from spreading too much while baking. The sugars, eggs and flour I used are organic. I doubled the amount of salt as I find most cookie recipes under-salted. I also omitted the nuts and didn't quite have enough chocolate chips to fully double their quantity — I came closer to having 5-1/2 cups of chocolate chips than 6 cups. The chocolate chips I use are still PC The Decadent Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips, a non-dairy semi-sweet chocolate chip.

Rather than follow the recommendation to allow the entire batch of dough balls to "rest" for at least 6 hours, I baked off a half-dozen cookies immediately. The author is right, not allowing the dough to rest results in "just regular chocolate chip cookies". Still, I managed to get my craving out of the way and tomorrow I'm going to have what promises to be a little over four dozen durn good cookies to nibble on.