A couple months back, I realized that I was slowly turning vegan, thanks to all of the wonderfully delicious plant-based products coming to market. So I was excited when the team behind the vegan and gluten-free Proper Cookie Dough, told me about their Kickstarter and sent me a couple batches to review.
It’s probably best to define Proper by listing what it lacks. As my colleague, Catherine, pointed out to me, it’s not that hard to make gluten-free or vegan cookies, but making them both vegan and gluten-free is tricky. If that weren’t enough, Proper is going beyond all that, making cookie dough that anyone — even those with food allergies — can eat. To wit, Proper has:
- No dairy
- No soy
- No eggs
- No nuts
- No corn
- No trans fat
Proper is also organic, non-GMO and can be eaten raw or baked (more on that in a moment). The company sent me jars of the Chocolate Chipper and the Triple Chocolate varieties. For each, a serving is 2 tablespoons (HA! Sure.) and contains 130 calories, 9g of sugar, 7g of fat and between 115 – 120 mg of sodium. For comparison, JUST’s brand of eggless chocolate chip cookie dough has 150 calories per 2 tbsp serving, 11g of sugar, 7g of fat, and 105mg of sodium. So the two are pretty similar, though JUST isn’t gluten-free and has soy.
So how’d it taste? Proper Cookie Dough is actually quite good when eaten raw. Both the Chocolate Chipper and Triple Chocolate had a nice, rich flavor with a pretty smooth texture. As you can probably guess, I ate more than 1 serving at a time.
However, Proper’s dough didn’t quite make a, well, proper cookie when baked. I balled up the dough, and used my June oven’s cookie setting to bake them. The dough never melted into a cookie shape and stayed spherical, so it was more like eating a chocolate chip lump. The cookie itself was dry (even when not burned) and not that pleasant to eat. Of course, I should probably have different expectations of a vegan and gluten-free cookie. If that’s the only way you could eat a cookie, it’ll probably be delicious. (Sidenote: Proper should send its recipe to the Big Data, Yummy Cookies guy.)
The good news, though, for this cookie dough, is that Proper has successfully met its campaign goals and raised more than $10,000 on Kickstarter. The campaign still has five days to go, so if you’re looking for an allergen-free cookie, you can still grab a sampler pack at the $45 dollar pledge level (you’ll have to wait until September for it to ship though).
