Ovenly's (vegan) chocolate chip cookies

Hard on the heels of trying Ovenly's peanut butter cookies (wonderful, by the way), I read about their "secretly vegan" chocolate chip cookies from Food52!  Now, you probably know that the photography over at Food52 is amazing so yes, the cookies looked incredible but, more importantly, the description really intrigued me.

Vegan chocolate chip cookies?  Not being vegan, I never gave the idea much thought. What happens in this case is eggs have been removed from the equation and the typical butter is likewise replaced with oil and water.  How crazy does that sound? And how neat if, in fact, you can make delectable chocolate chip cookies this way because how often do you drop the idea of making cookies when you realize you haven't the time to wait for butter to soften?  

So I entered this little experiment both excited but a little skeptical as well.  However, I held on tight to the promise that these cookies would be good, regardless of the ingredient list and whether or not they were vegan (*note: not being any expert on the topic, you should make sure the sugar and chocolate you use are vegan if that's important to you).

Another thing going for these cookies...they're so easy to make!  As with the peanut butter cookies, you don't even need a mixer.  The only thing you need is a little patience to let the cookie dough sit in the fridge 12-24 hours before baking.

So in case you also saw these cookies from Food52 and wondered about them like I did, I can tell you they are indeed "genius"!  Had I just been tasting them, I would not think they were anything other than a very good chocolate chip cookie (my son and husband agree).  Once baked, they look and feel everything like your "regular" chocolate chip cookie.  If you want to nitpick, I would say you might miss the butter flavor some but these cookies still have plenty of caramel notes and flavor from the brown sugar (I used dark brown).

In the vain of keeping things simple, I used 60% dark chocolate chips (instead of chopping up a bar of chocolate) and these cookies turned out the way I like them. Texturally, they're crisp along the edges and soft and chewy in the center.  There's the caramel flavor I mentioned and plenty of dark chocolate in every bite.  It's really good stuff and a great chocolate chip cookie to add to your rotation.  My family and I polished our little batch of these cookies off in no time.