Chocolate Easter Biscuits (Vegan)

I'll start off this recipe post by apologising for having two baking posts in a row! I'd had the flapjacks post scheduled for weeks and today I ended up making some chocolate biscuits for Easter that were nice enough to earn a recipe post of their own. And since Easter is literally two days away I figured I'd just pop this up today rather than leave it too late. Scheduling issues aside - can we have a little lol at my poor icing skills? I did everything by the book (or blog - as I used the icing I shared in my gingerbread Blogmas post last December) and I still somehow messed it up. I'm just not very artistic hahah.

I had a real nightmare trying to find a recipe to make simple vegan sugar cookies. I wanted to make Easter shaped biscuits because my stomach finds chocolate (even vegan chocolate) quite hard to handle and I still wanted something to nibble on whilst everyone was necking Mini Eggs. Turns out it's a lot more difficult to find a simple vegan recipe for biscuits that won't spread so I turned to my old vegan gingerbread recipe and altered it a little to make chocolate biscuits instead. It turned out alarmingly well (it was my first try and they were gooood) and I think they're nice enough on their own if you wanted to skip the icing.

INGREDIENTS (Makes 20 generous biscuits)
♥ 100g vegan butter. I use the dairy-free Flora as it's more creamy than oily.
♥ 50g soft brown sugar.
♥ 35g caster sugar.
♥ 4 tablespoons of golden syrup.
♥ 2 tablespoons of soy milk.
♥ 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.

♥ 250g plain flour.
♥ 30g + 2 tablespoons cocoa power.
♥ 1/2 teaspoon salt.
♥ 1/2 teaspoon baking powder.

METHOD

Step one. Put your butter, sugars, golden syrup and soy milk into a bowl and heat together. I used my microwave and it took exactly 2 minutes, although I took it out and stirred it after 1 minute. Stir it together really well until all of the little blobs of butter have melted, then add your vanilla extract and stir again.

Step two. Sieve your flour, cocoa, salt and baking powder into a large bowl and stir until combined.

Step three. Add your warm sugary-buttery liquid into the dry ingredients and stir together until it forms a loose dough. It's a little sticky and not very cookie-dough-like but don't you worry!

Step four. Tip your dough onto some cling film, wrap it up tight and pop it into the freezer for one hour. You can prepare your baking trays with baking paper now, although don't preheat the oven until step five!

Step five. Once the hour is up, remove your dough from the freezer and cling film and preheat your oven to 180oc. It's quite a stiff dough at first but give it a really quick knead and it should be easier to work with. I rolled mine quite thick - perhaps an inch or so deep - and then cut out my shapes. Try and choose cookie cutters which are all relatively the same size otherwise your cookies will all bake at different times!

 

Step six. Lay all of your shapes onto your baking trays. Don't worry about leaving a lot of room between them because they only spread the tiiiniest amount. I baked my biscuits for exactly 15 minutes, although the baking time could vary from 12-16 minutes depending on how giant your cookie cutters are, so take that into consideration.

Step seven. Once your cookies are baked, remove them from the baking trays and onto wire racks to cool completely. Whilst they're cooling, carry on with the icing recipe which you'll find in my gingerbread post - I'd write it here but this post is long enough as it is! The only small change I made was to add some vegan pink food colouring to some of the icing. I'll also say that the icing recipe makes waaaay too much icing for just 20 biscuits, so perhaps half or even quarter the recipe if you're not planning on making another batch.

Step eight. Once your cookies are completely cool, begin to ice them! I tried to 'flood' them with pink icing and then draw a design with the white icing but I completely fxcked it up hahaha, so simple stripes worked best for me. Feel free to let your creativity run wild and don't worry if you mess up like I did - we're all friends here, right?

Aaand you're done! These biscuits are nice and crisp around the outside but still soft and chewy in the middle. Tbh you could just completely skip the icing step altogether if you wanted because these biscuits are sweet and chocolatey enough on their own, although the icing does take them to another sweet level! Perfect for Easter, no?

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