Wondermum Bakes, Makes & Creates! - Vegan Chocolate-coated Cookie Dough Balls

Further to my Kids Kitchen post, I thought I would share one of our latest efforts - vegan chocolate coated cookie dough balls - yum :)

These are delicious and very moreish and crucially, something our littlest will eat.  Looking at him now, he appears a cheeky chubby little cherub and looks the picture of health, but what you don't see is how difficult it has been to get calories into him with his multiple food allergies and initially severe GORD (difficulties keeping food in).

So having high calorie allergy safe foods he will eat is a constantly evolving part of our journey with our Cub :)

We made these two ways - initially just following a fairly basic dough recipe and then adapting it to make it more vitamin enriched so see also my second post for the vitamin enriched version.

Recipe

The basic recipe we adapted from one of our favourite You Tuber bakers - Cupcake Gemma - so here is a link to her original (non-vegan recipe) which we then adapted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA7snO72lwU

Note - we did make quite a few alterations and also skipped quite a few ingredients, so this is our version as below:

• 225g dairy free spread (we used Pure)
• 220g soft brown sugar
• 1tsp vanilla essence
• 200g plain flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp water
• Vegan chocolate of choice, melted

(we missed things like baking powder, for example, as we aren't baking these so there is no need)

Method

• We mixed together the butter, Pure and vanilla.  This was just to combine them - so a very quick mix in the K-Mix (or you could do it by hand).  You don't want air in it, so just enough that it's mixed together.
• We added the flour and a pinch of salt and mixed again.  Initially on a half to let get the flour into the mixture so it doesn't shoot out everywhere (!) and then for about 30 seconds on a number 4.  This would take longer by hand but could still be done.
• We ended up with a chunky dough consistency - where the dough was not one ball but in chunky bits.
• We chose whether to add the water or not at this point and as ours looked on the dry side, we added the full tablespoon and mixed again as above.
• Next we took the dough out and as this also served as a sensory activity for my youngest (who really hates getting anything on his hands) we initially gave him the whole cookie dough ball to play with (and added chopped up pieces of his vitamins in an attempt to get him to eat those!)

• Next we took the tiniest amount of dough and rolled it into balls.  I could not believe how small the balls needed to be as by the time we added the chocolate, they were quite large and we were going for 'sweet' sized you could pop your mouth one at a time.
• I think the 'ideal sized' dough ball for us was probably only around half a heaped teaspoon!
• We rolled the dough balls in the melted chocolate that we placed on baking parchment spread over cooling racks (this is helpful for removing them later) and placed to set in the fridge.  
• Because ours were small they set in around half an hour.  If you make them larger you may need a longer setting time.

Overall Review

This initial recipe was a success on many levels!  The dough balls were delicious and this served as a great sensory activity where Cub played with the dough and was quite content to do so for a good 15/20 minutes and he also ate and enjoyed both the dough as well as the finished dough balls.  It is also a simple recipe the kids could all be involved in and so this was a great learning activity as well (more on that in other posts).

The dough was quite soft though and so it took a little longer chilling than I expected.  The vitamin enriched version we made was firmer.

The quantity was sufficient to allow for us to lose some through play as well as for Cub to eat plenty of dough and because the balls are so small, we still had plenty left to make the dough balls, which he ate as well (an achievement as with actual cookies, for example, he often won't eat the final biscuit and will only eat this in dough form, hence this recipe working for us!).

We tried vegan white chocolate but it seemed to disappear when we melted it so it took a huge amount to produce a tiny amount of melted chocolate.  Cub is not a fan of dark chocolate and so the best chocolate we found to be the vegan milk chocolate and so this was the final favourite :)

WM x

Cub was very happy to be tactile with this dough which is truly amazing as he really can't bear his hands being covered in anything - he even started building towers with it!

Cub even took to 'rubbing' the dough on himself and his brother - a huge sensory leap! (Although Roar isn't so sure!)