These Vegan Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cookies are one of the best pantry recipes ever. Featuring only a few home staples, you can throw them together and bake them in under half an hour.
Since this quarantine business started, I have been baking almost every day. We are at the point now where I just freeze my bakes, and our freezer has never been fuller. From cakes to biscuits, from breads to baked oatmeal, I have done the lot! And then a few bananas I had bought started going brown and spotty again and I found myself in the conundrum: to banana bread or not to banana bread? Having just baked a banana loaf a few days ago, now comfortably sitting in the freezer, I decided I would attempt something different. I would make some sort of breakfast cookies. And they were going to be vegan cookies. And super easy ones as well. Deal.
As you might already know, I do eat a plant-based food regularly. Yet, I find vegan baking a bit intimidating. Some recipes look amazing, but call for many ingredients I am not used to keep in my pantry such as flax, vegan margarine, agar agar and so on. I have chia seeds, maple syrup and I will source some vegan butter when on offer, but it kind of ends there. This year, I am trying to rectify that and bake more vegan treats, particularly those that don’t require too many different ingredients, because not only do I want to bake vegan, I also want you to be able to do that as well.
So, as I embark on my vegan experiments, I decided to start nice and easy with these Vegan Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cookies. This idea came from the Vegan Banana Breakfast Muffins I made a while ago, but then opted for cookies because... well, who doesn’t love a cookie? With this very simple and yet compelling question, I started searching in my cupboard and found that, along with my brown banana, I had rolled oats, maple syrup, vanilla extract, peanut butter and some vegan dark chocolate (this was accidentally vegan but I am still going to pat myself on the back about it!). Was that enough to make some super tasty, gooey cookies? Hell yeah! And that’s how it started.
These cookies are so convenient and a lovely way to get your kids involved in baking as well. They only require one bowl, minimal chopping, and they are ready in minutes. Their consistency is dense and gooey, super filling and satisfying. I have been having three of four in the morning and it is the most filling breakfast! That is due to the rolled oats and the peanut butter. It’s like having a bowl of porridge, but without even having to put the oats on the stove or in the microwave. So lazy and brilliant.
To make things extra lazy, I used cup measurements rather than weighing every single ingredient on a scale. Although I love using cup measurements when baking because they make the process super quick, I also understand that not everyone has US cups at home, so I listed the measurements both in cups and grams / millilitres to make your life extra easy.
And speaking of making one’s life easier, these cookies hand themselves well to substitutions. Peanuts and nuts in general are a common allergy, so feel free to swap it for any nut butter or seed butter you can eat, keeping the same quantity. It is worth mentioning that these cookies do not overly taste of peanut butter. That flavour is actually quite subtle. The peanut butter is mainly there to bind all the ingredients together and give it that soft consistency. So changing the type of nut butter you use is not really going to alter the taste all that much.
Other substitutions can be:
Oats: if you don’t have rolled oats, feel free to use quick-cooking, porridge oats. You might need a few tbsp more and the swap might make your cookies a bit softer, but it’s still going to work 100%. I also suspect that steel cut oats and gluten-free oats will work as well.
Maple syrup: this can be substituted with agave syrup or date syrup and, if you don’t need this recipe to be vegan, even with honey. If using date syrup I would slightly reduce the quantity as it’s got quite a powerful flavour.
Vanilla extract: you don’t have it? Don’t use it. It will not be the end of the world, I promise. If you still want to add some oumph to these cookies though, add 1 tsp of ground cinnamon – that never fails.
Chocolate: I used vegan dark chocolate, but any chocolate that has been leftover from Christmas will do (though it might not be vegan). You can also use some good old dark chocolate chip. The only reasons I did not use them here are a) I looove a nice, thick chocolate chunk and b) I had run out of chocolate chips!
So there you have them: a super versatile, easy vegan recipe to introduce you to the magic world of plant-based baking. I love having them alongside a cup of coffee, but they are perfect to dunk in a glass of (plant) milk. Being refined-sugar free, these cookies are perfect as a post-workout snack too. I don’t know about you, but I feel like they tick all the boxes.
Ingredients:
Makes 12 small cookies
2 cups (200 grs) rolled oats
1/3 cup (80 gr) peanut butter
1/4 cup (60 ml) maple syrup
25 gr dark chocolate
1 medium overripe banana
½ tsp vanilla extract
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180°C.
In a large bowl, smash the overripe banana with a fork. Add the maple syrup, peanut butter and vanilla extract and mix until you get a smooth batter.
Chop the chocolate into small chunks and add them to the bowl along with the rolled oats. Mix until you get a firm, not too wet mixture - a batter that you can easily shape into cookies. Roll a couple of tbsp of the mixture into a ball and then press them to create small cookies (mine where just under 2 inches large).
Transfer them to a baking tray lined with baking paper. If you want to be super decadent you can press some extra chocolate chunks on top of each cookie (which will melt and go all gooey and chocolaty).
Bake for around 12 minutes.
These cookies can be stored in an airtight container for up to 5 days.
Enjoy!
Did you try this recipe? Have you got any questions? We would love to hear from you! Let us know by leaving a comment below! Xx
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