Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts

These Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts bake up buttery and tender, with crisp edges and a gooey center, all mingled with melty chocolate chips and large chunks of crunchy walnut. I am obsessed with this cookie and all it’s texture and flavor and aroma. Plus, there are so many walnuts in each cookie that you actually feel kinda good about nibbling on them. Well, really, I always feel good when I treat myself to a cookie. Or two.

I share my recipe as well as the chocolate chips I use in these cookies – and highly recommend you give a try!!…

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Like all my recipes, these Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts are vegan, plant-based, free of animal products — whatever you are labeling it these days. Veganizing cookies is so easy these days thanks to plant-based egg alternatives like JUST Egg liquid and a whole host of other egg replacer options.

For the butter, I still use Earth Balance sticks (the soy-containing variety in the yellow-brown box.) I have tried other vegan butters on the market, but I always come back to Earth Balance. I want to try making my own butter just for fun one day, since I recently tried some homemade vegan butter at a fancy restaurant and loved it.

Another ingredient at this fancy vegan restaurant: JUST Egg! Yup, it is that great, that restaurants actually cook with it. They had vegan frittatas and scrambles on the menu.

The Vegan Chocolate Chips

Ok, so my absolute favorite new chocolate chip: Endangered Species Oat Milk Chocolate Chips! I am not a oat milk groupie or anything, and I definitely love my old stand-by chocolate chips from Guittard. But these new Oat Milk chips are so amazing in cookies. I love them because they are tiny chips and melt really well. And they have a lovely creamy texture and flavor. They are only 55% cacao, but taste nice and rich still.

If you want to check them out, you can buy them on Amazon. though I found them in Whole Foods. They actually make a dark chocolate (75% cacao) chocolate chip variety too, but I have yet to try those.

Curious to learn more about chocolate? Check out my Everything About Chocolate post.

Walnuts in Cookies

Walnuts are my favorite nut to add to cookies. They have such amazing texture and the dough weaves in and out of the walnut crevices to create a gooey, chewy texture to the cookie.

I adore walnuts for their health benefits as well. Walnuts are rich in omega fatty acids, fiber and healthy fats. They also contain some protein. Though the “nut” with the highest protein content is a peanut — even though it is technically a legume.

I usually buy a bag of “halves and pieces” walnuts – organic or not is fine. I like the halves and pieces bags because you get some nuts that are giant and some that are smaller. If I don’t have enough smaller bits, I will crush up a ½ cup or so to get some finer pieces. The finer – even smushed – walnut pieces lend to the overall nutty accented flavor of these Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts.

Optional: Add a pinch of coarse or flaked sea salt on top after baking