Vegan Chocolate-Chip Cookie Bars

So, yesterday I helped out with a wonderful student-run festival at my university. I could go on about how awesome the whole event was, but since I imagine you're here for the recipes and not to hear about my life, I'll stick to the plan. For the event, I made vegan chocolate-chip cookies. I've never found a recipe online that I liked particularly, since I don't often have access to manufactured egg- or butter-replacers, so this I mostly just made up. Still no egg-replacer, since the store I went to - usually a dependable store for these things - didn't even stock anything of the sort. Also note, I made this recipe on the massive scale (roughly six times these amounts), and decreased that amount for you, so this is rougher than usual. I'll probably make it again soon and make actually cookies, and when I do, I'll be sure to post that version.

Ingredients:

1 2/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1/2 cup nuts (I used walnuts and almonds)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon*

1 3/4 cups vegan chocolate chips* (Trader Joe's semi-sweet chips are vegan, which are what I used)

1 c turbinado sugar

1/4 cup vegan butter substitute, room temperature (I used Earth Balance original organic)

1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce

2 teaspoons vanilla*

1/3 cup vanilla soymilk

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Preheat oven to 350*.

Put nuts in a food processor, and blend until finely ground. I found that, once they reached a certain grain-size, that they started to stick together. Add a bit of the flour to the mix, and it should stop sticking together and grind better.

Combine flour, nut powder, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in large mixing bowl. Form a well in the center, and set aside.

In a food processor, grind the sugar until fine.

In separate bowl, cream butter substitute and sugar, adding the applesauce gradually. Add in the vanilla and soymilk, mix again, and add to the dry ingredients, along with the chocolate chips. Mix until incorporated, but don't overmix.

Now, you can shape them into cookies, or, like me, you can make cookie cake. Either way, place them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake them for about 8 minutes, turn them, and bake them another 6 minutes. I warn you that our ovens bake things slowly, and these cookies will not look set when they're actually quite done. Also, these times were for the massive cookie cake, so I must apologize for how ridiculously unhelpful I am forced to be about timing. The edges should get just a little darker, and then they'll be ready to come out. If you bake them too long, they'll be quite hard and very sad.

* As usual, these are just guesstimates for how much I put in. More or less is always fine (although why you'd ever want less of tasty things is beyond me). Well, if you add too much chocolate, the bars are overwhelmed, as they were the first time I made this. Even if you love chocolate, for the love of all things holy, do not add anywhere near 3 cups of chips. Bad things happen. If you simply must, sprinkle them on top before you bake the bars.

Mmm, photo to come later.

~The Baker's Apprentice