Haunted Vegan Wheat-free Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've been jonesing. Jonesing for some chocolate. Hard. What form this chocolate came in was not the biggest concern for me, but I did know that I was terrified of the idea of buying "vegan" chocolate.

But that's what the recipe called for.

I received a gift card to Barnes and Noble for Christmas and decided to put it towards the purchase of a new vegan cookbook. Everyone I've spoken with says that Veganomicon is the Bible of vegan cooking, so I went ahead and bought it. It arrived to my office at work last week which was probably the worst thing to happen to my productivity level since the internet was invented (don't worry coworkers/bosses, if you're reading this, the book is now confined to my house). As I perused this book, I came upon a recipe for Wheat-free chocolate chip cookies and decided to go for it. Even though it included things that made me nervous...nervous in terms of taste, but more nervous in terms of costs.

I went to the local Whole Foods and spent probably around 45 minutes in the "bulk" section, trying to find vegan chocolate chips (found them), trying to find flaxseeds (found them), trying to find oat flour (did not find, but didn't look because I ground up some good ol' fashion oats meself), and lastly, trying to find arrowroot. I had no idea what arrowroot was nor why it is important (if you're interested, here' the link to it's wikipedia page).

Now, here's the spooky part. I made these cookies and they were DELICIOUS! Like, better than non-vegan chocolate chip cookies, but when I tried to find the recipe online to pass on to all of you, none of these recipes included arrowroot. Which leads me to a few different conclusions:
1) I dreamt the whole thing about arrowroot, which just goes to show how BORING my dream-life is.
2) I have a different edition of the Veganomicon book that includes arrowroot in this recipe (doubtful).
3) I was possessed by some ghost-like being who felt the need to make me and the ones I love eat arrowroot. Not sure what happens next. You probably don't want to let me around small children for awhile...

It's not like I LIKE arrowroot...heck, I wouldn't even know how to begin to tell you how to cook with it. So, I'm thoroughly confused as to what happened. But these cookies were seriously bomb.com.

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients
1 3/4 cups oat flour (or make your own, like I did - ground up around 2 cups oats, yielded about 1 3/4 cups)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 Tablespoon flax meal
1/4 cup soy milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup chocolate chips

Directions
Preheat oven to 375 F.

Sift together flour, baking soda and salt.

In a small mixing bowl, whisk together flax meal and soymilk. Add sugar and stir, add oil and vanilla and whisk vigorously until all ingredients are emulsified (about a minute). (FYI, emulsified means mixing up liquids that are difficult to combine until they combine...had to google that one)

Mix wet ingredients into dry, fold in chocolate chips.

Drop batter by the tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheet, leaving and 1 1/2 inches of space inbetween cookies.

Bake for 10 -12 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool for a bit (5 minutes). Using a spatula, put them on a cooling rack or plate to cool the rest of the way.

I couldn't tell you how much arrowroot I used...

Next time I'm going to try this recipe sans arrowroot. Can only imagine the cookies are like walking on a cloud with puppies jumping all around, because that's about how good they were with my own addition.