Vegan Chocolate Zucchini Cookies

The first time I dined with my future mother-in-law, she caught me dipping a forkful of peas into my mashed potatoes. Embarrassed to be busted in a food faux pas, I over-explained, “I don’t like how peas taste. This hides their pea-ness.” In that moment, all parties involved hoped the earth would swallow me whole like my starch-costumed legumes. I eventually became more graceful at both conversation and the fine art of vegetable disguise. This time of year, I’m a big fan of zucchini bread, whose sweet buttery taste doesn’t at all resemble its namesake squash. The bread’s tender texture is due in part to the fact that a zucchini is 95 percent water. And while eating a loaf of zucchini bread does not count toward our recommended eight daily glasses, I thought perhaps this green chameleon could be substituted for the dairy in a cookie recipe. The first step was to chop up the zucchini into a sneaky size. Shredding in my food processor made stringy green strands that would fool no one, but grating the zucchini on the small holes of a box grater yielded much finer bits in just a minute. Once the zucchini is grated, remove as much water as possible, or else your cookies will be soggy. Simply wrap the grated zucchini in a pile of paper towels or clean dishcloth and squeeze over the sink. Then let the bundle rest. Even after all that wringing, the fresh zucchini made the cookies so moist and spongy I didn’t need to add soy or almond milk. The most difficult cookie ingredient to vegan-ize is sugar. You may be surprised to know that granulated white sugar (the type most of us keep in our sugar bowls) isn’t vegan. That’s because fragments of cattle bones, called char, are used as a filter to make the sugar sparkling white. And no, brown cane sugar is not better; it’s just char-brightened white sugar with a little molasses. Turbinado sugar, which is unrefined cane sugar, is vegan, but the larger turbinado grains didn’t fully incorporate when I creamed it in the vegan butter, nor did they melt while baking. Hoping to do better than a crunchy hockey puck, I hunted around the baking aisle at Whole Foods and found coconut palm sugar. These grains blended into the vegan butter beautifully, and its caramel-like taste is so flavorful, I used a quarter cup less sugar than my traditional recipe called for. To make my cookies extra decadent, I decided to add chocolate chips. The chips you use depend on how strictly vegan you are, since it’s easier to slip a vegetable into a cookie than it is to find inexpensive vegan chocolate made in a milk-free facility. If you prefer to spend approximately three times more for chips that aren’t milk-adjacent, Whole Foods’ Equal Exchange Bittersweet Chocolate Chips contain organic ingredients and promise to be free of major allergens, including dairy. If you find the whole concept of vegan chocolate chips to be overwhelming, simply substitute nature’s own candy, raisins, and move on. My cookies were soft and sweet with enough healthy ingredients to count as a salad in my food journal. Unfortunately the coconut palm sugar made them a drab brown color, and the flecks of green zucchini weren’t fooling anyone. A few tablespoons of cocoa powder saved the day, transforming the cookies into little mounds of fudgy happiness. Even if you divulge the hidden zucchini, the cookies are so tasty the resulting conversation won’t be the slightest bit awkward.