HOMEMADE OREO COOKIES
So let’s talk OREO COOKIES. For some of you probably the best (accidentally vegan) cookie out there. And you got a point. It’s such a simple cookie but yet so freaking delicious. By combining a dark cocoa cookie with an ever so slight salty note and a pleasantly sweet vanilla sugar cream filling an Oreo cookie just hits all the right spots at once. It’s been quite some time that we wanted to try making these at home but honestly we never had a starting point really, because it is a pretty unique cookie considering its flavour and looks. So I did what I normally do when I want to ‘recreate’ a snack or a food that does already exist as a product in supermarkets: I went to the supermarket and looked at the ingredients list of the basic Oreo cookie, to see what they put in there and whether it gives me any clues on how to make those cookies at home by myself. For the Oreo cookies I found the obvious: flour, cocoa and sugar but they also used common ingredients that frequently appear in industrially produced foods like: glucose-fructose-syrup, different kinds of vegetable fats and emulsifiers. I love to do this kind of ‘detective investigation’ because by studying these food labels you sometimes realize how easy you could make most of this stuff at home, without any chemicals or preserving additives, and in a much larger quantities for much less money.
Hi, we’re Marie and Michael, two foodies living and studying in Vienna!
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Recipe Video:
Anyways coming back to the Oreo undertaking: looking at the ingredients list I realised that there wasn’t that much to it after all. All I needed was basically fat, sugar, flour and cocoa powder. However I wasn’t able to get a cocoa powder that was dark enough to give my cookies that final dark, almost black colour. As a matter of fact we bought 6 different cocoa powders (which were basically all the different cocoa powder brands we were able to find) which all turned out to be super light in colour meaning they were never ever in a million years able to dye our cookies black. Therefore I ended up adding some black food colouring to the dough because I desperately wanted them to look like ‘real’ ores. So I cheated a little bit. Don’t be mad. And if you’re able to get dark cocoa powder you won’t have any difficulties at all so it’s all good. Anyways where was I... Oh yes! So I tried baking these and they turned out great. Disclaimer this FOR SURE isn’t a healthy or sugar free recipe. It’s a full on convenience cookie recipe with all the (vegan) butter and all the sugar there is. But that’s OK sometimes that’s just exactly what we need, right? Plus if it’s all homemade, you basically earned it. So that’s enough talking about for now, let’s get to the recipe, shall we?
For the dough you need:
220g butter
100-150g Sugar (we normally use less sugar when baking, because most of the times it’s just SO MUCH SUGAR)
egg replacement for 2 eggs (approximately 120g)
2TL salt
250g flour
150g dark cocoa powder
½ TL baking soda
(if you can’t get hold of dark cocoa powder you can also add some black food colouring to your dough as to achieve that dark ‘Oreo look’ for your cookies)
Filling:
100g (vegan) butter
220g powdered sugar
1-2TL Vanilla extract
Preparation
1. For the egg replacement add 2tsp psyllium husk powder to 120g of water, mix and put aside until thickened.
2. Now cream together the butter and the sugar. Add in the egg replacement and mix.
3. Next sieve in the dry ingredients. Mix until combined into a cohesive dough (be careful not to overmix the dough).
4. Now wrap in cling film or put into a bowl and cover, transfer into your fridge for 1 hour.
5. Pre-heat your oven to 180°C.
6. Roll out your dough thinly and cut out oreo-sized cookies with a round cutter. Put the dough circles onto a lined baking tray and bake for 15 minutes.
7. Let the cookies cool down completely before moving on.
8. For the filling cream together the butter, the powdered sugar and the vanilla until nice and fluffy.
9. Now it’s time to assemble the cookies. With a knife or a small spatula spread the vanilla buttercream onto the cookie. Top with a second cookie and carefully press them together. Proceed doing so until you ‘glued’ all your cookies together.
10. Now place you cookies back in the fridge for the filling to solidify again. And after just 1h you’re ready to enjoy your own homemade Oreo cookies. Enjoy!
For the reel(video) of the recipe on Instagram click here