Vegan Mexican Chocolate Cookie

Vegan Mexican Chocolate Cookie

I was really in the mood for some spicy chocolate the other day so I made these for the art opening at Pile of Bricks, around the block from my house. This is a slight variant of a tester cookie I made for Little Baby's Ice Cream. We have never made them there yet. I was worried about them being too spicy for a general audience so I toned them down a bit. I used a guajillo and an ancho chile, both dried. The ancho is a mild. smoked poblano pepper and the guajillo is also mild. They add a lot of flavor without too much heat. I probably could have used 2 of each without the cookie being crazy hot. Instead, not realizing this until the batter was made, I  added 1 tsp cayenne to a bowl of sugar and rolled the cookies in that before baking. It worked perfectly. Now they were pretty, chocolatey, and spicy.

Vegan Mexican Chocolate Cookie

352g unbleached all purpose flour
6g baking soda
6g salt
40g cocoa powder

218g earth balance margarine
190g unbleached cane sugar
203g brown sugar
1 guajillo chile
1 ancho chile
1tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cardamom

21g flax seed
83g water
13g vanilla

1 bag of non dairy semisweet chocolate chips

200g unbleached cane sugar
1 tsp cayenne powder


In a small bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, salt and cocoa. (This recipe has tons of salt, chocolate cookies can handle more and spicy food can handle more. Keep it all balanced. Or use less if your concerned about saltiness but cookies are probably not the thing to make if you have any health concerns.) 


Grind the dry chiles in a clean coffee grinder, ideally an extra one that you don't use for coffee. Then cream the butta with chiles and spices. This helps the spices absorb into the fat, retaining the essential oils and becoming more evenly distributed throughout the cookie. Once the butta is softened up and full of flavors, cream the sugar into the butta in 2 additions. 

Next grind the flax seeds in the coffee grinder that you used for chiles. This will help clean out all the chile. Put the ground flax in a very small bowl and add the water. Whisk vigorously.until fully incorporated. Let sit for 1 -2 mins, depending on water temperature and vigor while whisking. The flax while get thicker and more gelatinous. This is how to make vegan eggs for baking recipes.


Add the fleggs to the large bowl with the butta/sugar mixture and stir well to combine. Add vanilla and stir again. Add the flour mixture to the everything else mixture in 2 batches. Stir just until combined, no floury spots but don't overmix. Cookies do not need to be kneaded, we arent trying to develop the gluten. Chewy cookies are created by caramelization of sugar, not through chewy glutinous dough like pretzels and bagels.

 Scoop cookies with a tiny ice cream scooper/ cookie scoop that is 1 Tablespoon. Roll several at a time in spicy sugar. Put 20 on a half sheet pan. Press down gently on each one with the palm of your hand. Bake 11 1/2 minutes at 350. Let cool 10 minutes on pans then remove to cool completely. This spacing and pan fullness and cooking time will produce perfect results. Less full pans will cook quicker, bigger cookies will cook slower. Do whatever you like but I urge you to try my way if at all possible, they will come out barely crisp on the edges, super chewy all through and a tiny bit doughy right in the center.

Fermented (?) Vermouth Hot Sauce

So I found this chili head message board on the internet and someone on there had a post about fermenting chilies in white wine. I assume, over the several weeks it was supposed to take to make this, that the wine would convert to vinegar as it was exposed to air. I never have white wine laying around, but I always have vermouth. Now vermouth is a fortified wine; it is a higher percentage of alcohol, and it is also infused with a variety of herbs. I didn't know if the higher proof would slow down or destroy that wine to vinegar conversion but I gave it a go anyway. I also think this is more an infusion of chili in booze to make sauce than truly fermenting chili.

I used Carpano Antica, which is a higher end vermouth with a bittersweet, very herbaceous profile. The end result is very tasty but perhaps not the best use of expensive vermouth. While there is some herby undertones, the chili heat really dominates. Which, I suppose, is to be expected because it is hot sauce. I think if I made it again I would use very mild chiles like anaheims so the vermouth could be noticed more. I think this is more an infusion of chili in booze to make sauce than truly fermenting chili. So, being hopeful, I added raw pickle brine as a starter to maybe get things fermenting...

When I decided it was finished, I blended it all up. This was very annoying because there was so little of it. Stopped to scrape down the blender every second. No matter what, all the seeds never ground up; so I strained it. This gave the sauce a smooth consistency and it wont keep getting hotter while the seeds sit and infuse in the sauce while its refrigerated.


Vermouth Hot Sauce

(this was all done with a scale, based on how many chilies I had, with 2% salt and vermouth to cover)

84g chili (mix of yellow jalapeno, tabasco, habanero and mostly cayenne)
2g salt
187g vermouth 
1Tbl raw fermented pickle brine (from green bean pickles- haricot vert, salt, garlic)




Chop chilies and combine all ingredients in a jar. Stir or shake every few days for a few weeks. I ended up doing 3 full weeks in a cool fall philadelphia. 

 Blend it. 

Strain it. 

Bottle it.