Vegan Double Chocolate Buckwheat Brownie Cookies (Vegan, Gluten-free, Grain-free option, Nut-free)

Deeply chocolatey, fudgy and dense in the middle, and crisp at the edges, these cookies are a deliciously decadent treat that just so happen to be vegan, gluten-free, and really easy to make. Buckwheat flour adds a lovely nutty undertone to the dark and rich cocoa-packed batter, and generous chunks of vegan white chocolate provide pockets of vanilla-tinged sweetness.

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If you have ever pondered over the possibility of combining the crisp outer shell and chocolate chip content of a cookie, with the dense and fudgy chocolate depths of a brownie, then look no further! These brownie cookies are darkly decadent, dangerously moreish and right at the intersection of cake and cookie.

I’ll be honest, I did not exactly intend to make brownie cookies. I wanted to make regular cookies with buckwheat flour, to see how they turned out. Buckwheat, despite its misleading name, is a actually a seed, and therefore gluten and grain-free. It is quite a heavy flour, but very nutritious, and has a distinctive nutty flavour which beautifully compliments dark chocolate. Using fairly standard cookie recipe proportions, with the addition of a flax egg to bind everything together, what emerged from the oven were these little gems. Half biscuit, half brownie and wholly delicious.

How to make double chocolate buckwheat brownie cookies

To begin with, you’ll need to make a flax egg. This is a simple combination of ground flax seeds mixed with a little water, which will thicken when left for a few minutes. It’s this gloopy texture which will help to bind your cookies together. It needs to be left for 5–10 minutes, so I do this first before gathering the rest of the ingredients.

In a large mixing bowl, sieve in all of the dry ingredients; the buckwheat flour (which you can find is most large supermarkets and health food shops), cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Whisk these together so that everything is combined.

In a heat-proof bowl or saucepan, melt the vegan butter (I recommend using Naturli Vegan Block, but any vegan spread will do), then stir in some soft light brown sugar and vanilla essence. Roughly chop your vegan white chocolate into small chunks – Sainsbury’s Free From White Chocolate is excellent, and Tesco and Asda do a similar thing in smaller bars. Most vegan white and milk chocolate contains rice flour, so if you are grain-free you can substitute this with dark chocolate – a sweeter one such as Bournville would work well.

By this time your flax egg should be nice and gloopy, and ready to be stirred into the butter and sugar mixture. Make sure that your oven is hot and you have a baking tray ready, lined with baking paper or a silicone mat. Pour the wet ingredients (the butter mixture) into the dry ingredients, and stir until you have a thick batter, then stir in the white chocolate chunks until they are evenly distributed through the dough.

Scoop heaped tablespoons of mixture onto your baking tray, a few inches apart, until you’ve used up all the batter. You should get about 12 cookies. Then pop in the oven for 11–12 minutes.

The cookies are ready when the edges are firm to the touch, and there’s a little resistance when you poke them in the middle, though they’ll still feel quite soft. As you can see from the images, the cookies don’t spread very much. This is partly why they have a lovely fudgy center, but so you definitely have a cookie rather than a baked blob, as soon as you take the cookies out of the oven, slam the baking tray on your work surface or oven-top. This will help to flatten the cookies a little.

Leave to cool on the tray for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack. They are particularly good on the first day they are made, but you can keep them in an airtight container for 2–3 days. Although, if your house is anything like mine, they are unlikely to last that long.

Please let me know if you give these a try! I would love to know what you think of them, and any feedback is appreciated. You can comment below, use the star rating at the top of the blog post, or tag me on Instagram or Twitter @greedybearbakes.