Vaughn Vreeland's Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookie But Vegan
#NYTCookieWeekButVegan2023
It’s time for Cookie # 2, baby! ICYMI, this post is part of a series wherein I veganize all the cookies from the New York Times Cooking Cookie Week, arguably my favourite part of the holiday season. The challenge kicked off with an emotional introduction and some easy vegan butter and egg recipes right here. Cookie #1 was Eric Kim’s Matcha Latte Cookie should you wish to catch up. Onward!
Cookie 2: Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies by Vaughn Vreeland
—> The Actual Recipe (gift link, obv)
—> TL;DR:
I’m OBSESSED with the Vaughn Vreeland Cinematic Universe; I won’t apologize.
The cookie recipe works great as written using my homemade vegan butter and eggs; I think it would also work well with a good vegan block butter like Miyoko’s.
EXCEPT my dough wasn’t moist enough when I added the flour; if this happens to you, add some plantbased milk or even water. For me, two tbsp of soy milk brought the dough together.
Dandies Vegan Marshmallows work great.
Contrary to the recipe, shape these when the dough is at room temp, then freeze them and bake from frozen. You can try as written, but I found the cold dough a nightmare to stuff.
If you’re baking from frozen, 18 minutes seems good, but watch at the end and pull right when the marshmallows start to bubble forth!
If memory serves, Vaughn Vreeland’s Peppermint Brownie Cookie video was the first Cookie Week content I ever consumed, back in 2021. Since, I’ve not only been obsessed with Cookie Week, but with the Vaughn Vreeland Cinematic Universe as a whole. Why? Firstly: Vreeland’s actual job at NYT Cooking is not recipe developer, but video producer. Once I learned this I came to realize he may be THE SECRET MASTERMIND BEHIND EVERYTHING I ENJOY?
Exhibit A: Here’s Alison Roman clearly having a blast telling Vaughn not to shoot inside her messy fridge, and him lightly cackling in the background, and I like to imagine they just had so much fun all day, trading witty barbs and being mildy bitchy about their readership. (Yes, I do a lot of Cooking YouTube fanfic in my mind, don’t you? And no, there will be no further exhibits because I realized almost in the nick of time that I could easily cede all of my precious writing hours to making YouTube clips of Vreeland’s delight-inspiring off-screen presence rather than writing this post. Just know that they’re there once you’re looking, there’s a really nice one with Claire Saffitz that I can’t find right now.)
Anyway! The Peppermint Brownie vid charmed me so much that I naturally kept watching when YouTube suggested Eggnog Snickerdoodles from 2020, Cookie Week’s birth year. That video became a formative text in my life. Eggnog Snickerdoodles was shot during the deepest pandemic, by Vaughn himself, in his apartment, and there is something so pure and genuinely raw about his sadness and loneliness that bubbles forth between bouts of hilarity and genuine unhingedness and excitement, plus he has an “Au Revoir Felicia” magnet on his fridge. Also at the end when his 90-year-old granny who taught him to bake says his cookies are “better than chardonnay,” I cry five watches out of ten even though I’m a covid doomer whose knee-jerk reaction was “He should not have been visiting his grandma or anyone at that time!” but fuck it, it was clearly worth it to all involved, I’m glad they had a happy Christmas in North Carolina, though I still want everyone to mask up on public transit, okay? I don’t know, man, all that food media shot in people’s actual homes at the height of the pandy? Very special genre to me generally, with Eggnog Snickerdoodles serving as platonic ideal. Though I’ve yet to veganize those cookies (for shame) I’ve watched the video seven to eight hundred times.
Sure, I should probably feel humiliated at admitting this obsession, but I’m certain that Vreeland would understand? He reminds me so much of some of my funniest friends from high school — an arts high school in the suburbs of Toronto; a true shangri-la — that I feel I know him personally. And yet! This is probably me being homophobic and terrible, exhibiting the sense of entitlement of a classic 1990’s hag. To quote Vreeland’s own 2023 Cookie Week newsletter:
When I was a [camp] counselor, I would always ask people to describe themselves as ice cream flavors. I’ll go first: I’m Mexican hot chocolate. I’m a universally beloved flavor, but once you get to know me, I have a spicy complexity that is uniquely my own.
Obviously he’s unique and spicy and complex, not just a hilarious, endearing pal-to-all but also me specifically with pitch-perfect comic timing and an enviable Nicole Kidman impression existing solely to entertain! I don’t fucking know him! I just desperately wish I did! Alas, until he calls me declaring NYT Cooking in urgent need of a spacey, perimenopausal, vegan home cook, making Vreeland’s cookies is as close to knowing him as I’m gonna get. And that’s more than enough for me.
Forthwith, Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies!
I decided once again to just go for straight substitution with my butter and egg recipes, but! I remembered at the last minute that my nut-allergic friend was coming over on the weekend, and naturally I wanted to feed him many cookies and demand detailed analysis from an omnivore’s perspective, because I’m very fun to hang out with. So I made a new batch of butter with coconut yogurt, Riviera brand, which I think is VERY good — the Québécois do vegan right imo — but maybe only available in Canada? Anyway, I mention this only because it’s a slight ingredient variance, and it made zero difference. Both subs worked great, and maybe it’s safe to say they always will in a soft and chewy cookie of this type?
For marshmallows I used Dandies Vegan Marshmallows, the OG out of Chicago, with us since 2010. These are nothing fancy; simply a good, functional marshmallow. Not like I use marshmallows that much, but thank god they exist because once I tried to make my own for a camping trip with friends so my then-new vegan boyfriend could partake of the s’mores. What I produced was a very sweet, mucus-y gloop, gray in colour, that I inexplicably still brought along on the trip. That man gamely spread that gloop on his graham crackers, claiming it tasted good, and now he features in this newsletter and my life as “my partner David.” ❤️ Anyway, Dandies exist, they’re good, they may not melt quiiiite as well as regulars and they dry out faster, so store them in the freezer.
While Eric Kim’s cookie had me creaming the butter and sugar by hand, Vreeland wanted me to pull out the mixer. As a person obsessed with cooking, and more recently baking, you might think I’d have invested in a sexy honking stand mixer somewhere along the way, but no. I have a very basic hand mixer I bought from the grocery store across the street from my house at, like, 9pm when my old mixer — built in the sixties, inherited from my Oma Tausch, RIP — at long last bit the dust in the middle of a bout of aquafaba pavlova-making for…I don’t even remember! I do remember begging the hapless fourteen-year-old grocery store manager to sell me his floor model as it was the last mixer left. He definitely opened with, “Ma’am, I absolutely can’t,” the rest is a blur, but reader, I mixed the Hot Chocolate Cookies with that very floor model last night, so something must’ve gone right. The point is, it usually takes me at least ten minutes to cream the butter and sugar so it’s really light and fluffy like my NYT friends’, but I actually don’t mind standing there a-mixing. For me, the meditative, repetitive tasks are often what I love about baking the most. PLUS! I finally rigged up an extension cord so I could hand-mix on my kitchen island and watch YouTubes at the same time — bliss!
Another reason this batch took extra long to get creamy is I again forgot to let my butter come to room temp. Vreeland actually advises in his video to microwave your butter stick 15 seconds per side to bring it to the right place, which I did try, but my butter was in fact still frozen so 15 seconds didn’t do much. I did a little more, and the edges started liquifying because, well, coconut oil + yogurt is not actually butter and they do different things. So as I often end up doing, I just chopped the butter disks into chonks, had at it with the mixer, and a few hundred YouTubes later, presto-change-o, you know? This may be very basic to those of you from the baking world, but I can’t emphasize enough how much my cookies leveled up when I actually started bothering to cream my butter and sugar together for the right amount of time. Air! Crystals! Science!
The psyllium eggs once again functioned like a dream. I’ve been trying to research the science of why seeds and their husks are so magical, something to do with their hydroscopic properties that I don’t fully get yet, but straight up they emulsify mixtures just as beautifully as eggs do. Get into it!
Guess what, though, just like with Kim’s cookie, I ran into trouble when it was time to add the flour, and I! Have! Theories! We all know I’m an Alison Roman fan, and in Sweet Enough, her baking book, she explains:
When I get a cup of flour from the bag using the scoop-and-level technique…and weigh it, I get between 140 and 145 grams — this is the case for nearly all one hundred people I polled.
She goes on to say that many websites use other amounts, both lower and higher. Indeed, when I ran the calculation, it appears that the NYT is claiming a cup of flour weighs 128 grams. In the videos, the cooks’ flour is already pre-measured in cute bowls, and I BET it was measured by weight, because I know any baker worth their salt measures by weight, but I get lazy sometimes and have been doing scoop-and-level to this point in the cookie challenge. SO! I think I’m adding at least a tablespoon more flour per cup than my NYT friends are, and maybe that’s the problem?? In any case, as with Kim’s cookie, it was nothing two tablespoons of soy milk couldn’t solve. Going forward, maybe I’ll weigh.
I usually read the comments on a recipe before I make it, but didn’t this time, my trust in Vreeland so complete. Man, I wish I had. Vreeland has you chill the dough in balls and then stuff with frozen marshmallows just before baking. Impossible! Coconut oil def sets up firmer than butter in the fridge, but even allowing for that, I could barely press my dough into disks for stuffing after letting them warm up for twenty minutes. As such, I couldn’t really wrap the marshmallows very well, and though it tasted fucking delicious, my initial test cookie looked…a bit busted
To the comments I went, and after wading through a bunch of “left out the marshmallows, added half a leftover pina colada, turned out great!” type stuff, I found a trove of folks recommending that you shape them with the dough at room temp, then pop them in the freezer — the marshmallows need to be super-cold so they don’t disintegrate in the bake — and bake from frozen. I did it, I loved it, what loomed before me as a nightmarish, crumbly stuffing task became pure meditative party.
I ended up baking them from frozen for eighteen minutes, but I really recommend watching these guys closely at the end and pulling them out right when the marshmallows start busting forth. If you go too long after that, I find the marshmallow gets a bit more chewy than melty, so if you like that, by all means! Staring into the oven took me back to when my childhood bestie Jandy and I used to bake chocolate chip cookies together, like, every time we hung out? We’d just sit in front of the oven the whole bake time and trip out on them rising as if it were TV? The eighties, man! Our phones were anchored to the wall! Anyway, my cookies didn’t spread as much as Vreeland’s, maybe due to lack of eggs, but I daresay they are simply gorgeous in their own way, and they really taste AMAZING. Rich chocolate flavour, texture party, absolutely yes.
Okay, clearly ridiculous length is indeed part of the point of this project — and all that I do, who am I kidding — but one final note: my aforementioned partner David does not like spiced desserts. Not gingerbread, nor pumpkin pie, not even mulled wine. He thinks that’s gross. He’s wrong, but I love him. Given that he’s mostly into chocolate desserts, and less into the other kinds of cookies I’m baking this year, I made half my batch into White People Hot Chocolate Cookies instead — ie. nix the cinnamon and cayenne, roll in regular sugar. When I first tasted the non-spicy dough, it was lacking something, so I added a nip of almond extract, maybe a quarter teaspoon, based on OG vegan baking powerhouse, Isa Chandra Moscovitz’s advice that I can’t find online right now: a little almond extract in chocolate desserts doesn’t really taste like almond, it just boosts the flavour overall. Agreed! Good trick!
Also! I’m going to start a chat? Not just about these cookies, but a space where we can brainstorm how to veganize your own fave cookie recipe? Or whatever you want? If no one wants to do that, no prob, but I’m going to try it out. Look in your chat thingies I guess?
Final FINAL thing: zero pressure, ever, but should anyone wish to throw a tip my way via subscription, feel free! Annual subs are 50% off, plus you get my first novel, while supplies last! Byeeee!
Those cookies look amazing!
Beauty