Vegan Chocolate Orange Cookies with Coconut Himalayan Salt

Hello friends, I hope you all had a great Christmas and arrived happily, healthy and full of curiosity in the 2020s. The following article is a bit older, but due to difficult weather conditions and a sometimes too slow connection, my internet browser didn’t even want to open WordPress, let alone upload pictures.

That’s why you’ll get to read a few stories from 2019 in the next posts:) Let’s go back to last December, about 4 days before Christmas:

Hello everybody! Christmas is very special for us this year. At the moment, I’m sitting at Starbucks at the main station and waiting for our train to Frankfurt Airport. From there we’ll catch our flight to Manila this afternoon. When we were brainstorming about what to do this Christmas, we thought, why does Christmas always have to be traditional? Let’s do it differently this time. That’s why we decided to visit my boyfriend’s cousin and his family at his diving lodge in Southern Leyte, Philippines.

However, especially for Christmas, I prepared a vegan and gluten-free Christmas cookie recipe for you. The cookies taste very aromatic because of the orange zest. You can keep them for up to 4 days, maybe longer, but after 4 days we had eaten them all up.

During the last week, until I finally made my way to the main station, where I’m waiting now for my boyfriend with an almond Matcha Latte, two suitcases and two hand luggage bags, we had of course the typical pre-travel-“do-we-have-everything-we-need-for-the-trip-and- shouldn’t-we-buy-some-more-mosquito-repellant-stress”. While my friend is a very organized person, planning everything well ahead and preparing thoroughly for a big travel project, both mentally and practically, I’m more of the type “head in the sand and pretend nothing is going on”, who then wakes up one night before the trip, pulls the suitcase out of the closet as casually as possible and spontaneously throws in everything that is considered necessary. What’s missing because of a lack of planning is simply missing. Which is not always the best solution…

Up until now, I thought you could buy everything in the most remote corner shop at the edge of the jungle. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. In Bali for example, it has been quite difficult to buy certain sanitary items women need once a month at a price that doesn’t break your wallet. Fortunately, this time things are different. I don’t travel alone and everything has been thoroughly planned, thanks to my boyfriend (Now, speaking from the future, I can say that unfortunately that wasn’t the case. But more on that in the next post).

Vegan Chocolate Orange Cookies with Coconut-Himalayan Salt

• Author: antonia
• Prep Time: 1 hour
• Cook Time: 50 min.
• Total Time: 1 h 50 mins.
• Yield: 15 cookies

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Ingredients

1 vanilla bean
1/2 orange, zest
200 g whole grain rice flour
90 g ground almonds
3 tbsp nut butter
2 tbsp coconut fat
130 g maple syrup
1 tablespoon of ground flax seeds
3 tablespoons of water
100 g vegan chocolate
2 tbsp pink Himalayan salt
2 tbsp shredded coconut

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Instructions

ATTENTION:  CALCULATE 30 MIN. COOLING TIME!

 

1. Simply mix all the ingredients together and knead until you get a solid ball.
2. Mix 1 tablespoon of crushed flaxseed with 3 tablespoons of water, wait about 10 minutes and stir regularly.
3. Now knead the flaxseed mixture, which should now have a gel-like consistency, together with the dough.
4. Make sure that everything is mixed well and evenly. Place the ball wrapped in cling film in the refrigerator for at least half an hour.
5. Preheat the oven to 180° C/ 356° F top / bottom heat and remove the dough. Roll it out into a sausage-like shape about 4 cm in diameter and cut it into 1.5 cm slices.
6. Place the slices evenly on a baking sheet lined with baking paper and bake the cookies for about 50 minutes (yes, a very long baking time, but before that the cookies didn’t seem to be baked right through).
7. Then let them cool on a rack.
8. Meanwhile, you can let the chocolate melt in the water bath.

 

How does a water bath work?
Take a pot of your choice, into which fits a smaller pot, without sinking into the large pot. The smaller one should ideally be a saucepan, then you can put it diagonally into the large pot and it will hold on to the handle and no water will run into it from the bigger pot.

Fill the large pot about half with water and then place the small pot into the large one. Now, of course, the water rises. Make sure that at least half of the contents of the small pot can be warmed by the water from the bigger pot. The water should rise to half of the pot. Not higher, otherwise ist going to overflow.

 

Heat the water. It shouldn’t boil.

 

Now put the chocolate into the small pot. Over time, it will melt due to the heat given off by the water. Stir regularly and make sure the chocolate doesn’t get burned. When the chocolate is liquid, remove it from the large pot, turn off the stove and wipe the small saucepan dry from below. It is best to place the pot right next to the wire rack with the cookies, then it is easier to dip them into the chocolate and you wont run through the kitchen with dripping chocolate cookies like me …

 

If you also want to season your cookies with coconut salt on the biscuits, mix 2 tablespoons of grated coconut with 2 tablespoons of Himalayan salt. Now that you’ve half-dipped all the cookies in chocolate and put them on the rack to drain, sprinkle them on the chocolate side to taste. To make it look nicer  you have to sprinkle them 2-3 times.

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Keywords: vegan cookies, christmas cookies, chocolate cookies, vegan chocolate cookies, salted chocolate, vegan baking recipes

The cookies go wonderfully with coffee, with a glass of delicious Earl Gray or ginger tea.

As I said, even if unfortunately, they are no real Christmas cookies anymore, because they could not be posted on time due to the lack of internet access, I still hope that on cold winter days you will feel like baking and enjoy them like we did.