Gooey S’mores Crumbl Cookies (Vegan copycat!)

These gooey s’mores Crumbl-style cookies are made for dramatically breaking apart, melting slightly in your hands, and eating while warm. Thick and vegan, this cookie recipe is packed with graham cracker flavour, pools of melted chocolate, and soft, stretchy marshmallows baked right into the centre. Crispy on the edges, and soft in the middle, they bring the campfire nostalgia perfect for baking days in the kitchen with friends.

I’ve been cooking for over 15 years, but my wife’s been baking for even longer. I still pick up on things from time to time, and her world famous cookies happens to be one of them. I was never a big sweets guy, but I always had a sweet spot for cookies, and with the success of the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever, I wanted to mimic that base so that I could be sure of an instant cookie victory.

My Crumbl copycat cookies were developed because I wanted the crumbl experience. Thick, bakery-style indulgent cookies without the dairy or eggs. They also lack the disappointment that frequently accompanies vegan copycat recipes!

Countless batches later, each one taught me a thing or two about how fat, sugar and heat behave when you’re trying to come up with something that tastes familiar, and in my opinion, better!

Big cookies over small cookies, any day

My kind of cookie isn’t dainty or crumbly (pardon the pun), they’re intentionally oversized, rich and built for being gooey. A lot of s’mores desserts miss the mark, in my opinion, because they lean too hard on sugar and forget some of the basics (that’s doubly true for some vegan baking recipes). Here’s what makes my cookies work:

• The graham cracker flavour is baked separately from the dough. This helps the dough to rise perfectly and set before the toasted nuttiness of the homemade graham cookie can be added afterward.
• My chocolate is always added in chunks, not chips! you want uneven chocolate-y pools that melt at different rates for texture and eye appeal? Chunks every time.
• Placement of marshmallow matters. I always try and tuck as much of any exposed mini marshmallow into the dough before baking. Any exposed bit runs the risk of burning and drying out.

Cookie dough is a delicate thing!

But that doesn’t mean it’s complicated. After multiple test runs and taste tests. Lots of taste tests… I learned when my dough is pushed a little too far. Over-mixing led to a few dense batches, and under-mixing led to a cookie that quickly collapsed from weak, uneven spots.

You want this dough to be slightly tacky, and perfectly combined. This takes a bit of intuition, but I have a few tests will help you determine when this dough is at its best.

• They hold together when squeezed, but break cleanly in my hand when pulled apart.
• When I press a finger into it, I want the imprint to stay without any of it coming back off onto my finger.
• Visually, I just check for well rounded, even balls and no pockets of dry flour that went unmixed.

Adding crunch without ruining the gooey centre

One things that I pivoted to early in my testing was moving the texture from the inside of the cookie, to the outside. By that I mean, keeping the integrity of the soft centre intact, and adding a layer of crumbly sugar cookie to the outside for the iconic s’mores crunch.

This decision was to avoid a dry centre to my cookies. Sprinkled over warm cookies, my sugar cookie crumbles add a toasty, sweet crunch you get from real graham crackers without messing with the flavours of the marshmallow, chocolate and cookie dough base.

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