Chocolate Crinkle Cookies in Butter — Fudgy, Seed Oil Free, No Shortening

By Savannah Ryan — The Foodie Kitchen

Chocolate crinkle cookies are one of the most visually dramatic things you can bake — deep dark chocolate dough rolled in powdered sugar that cracks as it bakes to reveal the fudgy interior beneath. Every mainstream recipe uses shortening or vegetable oil as the fat. Both are seed oils. Both produce a flat, one-dimensional flavour that the chocolate has to work twice as hard to cover. This version uses melted butter — and the difference is immediate and significant. The butter adds a depth to the chocolate that shortening cannot touch, and the cookies come out with a fudgier, richer centre that sets more firmly as it cools.

Find more in the cookie recipes collection and the MAHA recipes collection. For 30 seed oil free baking recipes — Savor Cookies by Savannah Ryan.

Why Butter Beats Shortening Every Time

Shortening was invented in the early 20th century as a cheap industrial substitute for lard and butter. It is hydrogenated seed oil — a manufactured fat created by forcing hydrogen through liquid vegetable oil under pressure to make it solid at room temperature. It has no flavour, no nutritional value and produces cookies with a waxy, hollow texture that dissolves too quickly on the palate. Butter contains milk solids that brown during baking and create complex flavour compounds. It contains water that creates steam during baking and slightly lifts the texture. It contains fat-soluble vitamins and conjugated linoleic acid. According to PubMed research on dietary fats, butter from grass-fed cows is a meaningful source of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K2 — nutrients entirely absent from shortening. The Weston A. Price Foundation has documented that traditional baking cultures used butter and lard exclusively — shortening only entered baking after aggressive industrial marketing in the 1900s displaced ancestral fats.

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies in Butter — Seed Oil Free

Makes 24 cookies | Prep 20 minutes | Chill 2 hours | Bake 10–12 minutes

Ingredients:

115g unsalted grass-fed butter, melted and cooled slightly · 200g dark chocolate (70% or higher), melted · 200g caster sugar · 2 large eggs · 1 teaspoon vanilla extract · 180g plain flour · 40g good quality cocoa powder · 1½ teaspoons baking powder · ½ teaspoon salt · 100g icing sugar for rolling

Method:

1. Make the dough. Whisk the melted butter and melted chocolate together until smooth and combined. Add the caster sugar and whisk until the mixture thickens slightly — about 1 minute. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking well after each addition. Add the vanilla and whisk once more. The mixture should be glossy and smooth.

2. Add dry ingredients. Sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt directly into the chocolate mixture. Fold with a spatula until just combined and no dry streaks remain. Do not overmix. The dough will be quite soft and sticky — this is correct.

3. Chill. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for a minimum of 2 hours, or overnight. The dough must be cold to handle and to bake correctly. Cold dough spreads less in the oven and produces the signature thick, fudgy crinkle rather than a flat cookie.

4. Roll and bake. Preheat oven to 180°C / 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment. Place the icing sugar in a shallow bowl. Scoop tablespoon-sized portions of dough, roll quickly into balls and drop into the icing sugar. Roll to coat completely and generously — do not be shy with the sugar coating, it is what creates the dramatic crinkle effect. Place on lined baking sheets with 5cm spacing.

5. Bake. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. The cookies should look slightly underdone when they come out — the centres will still look soft and the crinkles will have formed but not fully set. Do not overbake. They firm up significantly as they cool on the tray and the fudgy centre is the whole point.

6. Cool. Leave on the baking tray for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. The cookies will continue to set as they cool. They are extraordinary warm but even better the following day once the chocolate has deepened.

The MAHA Baking Standard

Every ingredient in these cookies is either whole food or ancestral fat. Real butter from grass-fed cows. Real dark chocolate — cocoa beans and cocoa butter. Eggs. Flour. Sugar. Cocoa powder. There is no shortening, no vegetable oil, no seed oil of any kind. This is how cookies were baked before the industrial food system decided that manufactured fat was an acceptable substitute for real fat. It was never acceptable. Butter produces better cookies — and these prove it definitively. For 29 more seed oil free cookie and baking recipes — Savor Cookies covers everything from brownies to shortbread.

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