I don’t do anywhere near as much baking as I would like to, mostly due to time limitations and the fact that the kitchen in my Auckland apartment isn’t particularly big.
One thing that is pretty quick and easy to make is chocolate chip cookies and whilst waiting for some vegetarian lasagna to cook last night I made a batch up.
This recipe is vegetarian (don’t laugh, I’ve actually seen cookies that contain beef fat before – looking at you New World!) and also works well with NoEgg, incase you’re allergic to eggs or wish to avoid them for other reasons. If you found a good replacement for the butter and vegan chocolate, it might be possible to do a vegan variation.
It’s originally derived from a recipe on a back of the Cadbury Chocolate Chip packets I used, but with a number of modifications to tone down the amount of sugar and other improvements – the originals would make your vision blurry with sugar overload.
These are soft-style cookies, rather than hard (of course that depends a bit on how long you cook for…. ;-)
125g Butter 0.5 cup white sugar 1 cup raw sugar Heaped spoonful of honey 2 cups flour 1tsp vanilla essence 230g chocolate chips 1tsp baking powder 2 eggs or substitute such as NoEgg.
This recipe will make about 1 baking tray worth of cookies – fine to double up, but be aware not all mixers can handle the large volume of cookie dough well.
- Cream(blend) butter and sugar together. Ideally you’d use a food processor for this, but I don’t have one so I’m (mis)using an electric hand beater and trying to avoid spraying sugar everywhere. It takes a fair bit of work, ideally you want the butter to not be totally solid when you start.
Mmmmm buttery sugar. I will confess to eating this directly from the bowl.
- Add honey into the mix. This adds some more sweetness, flavor and makes a mixture a bit more sticky, important particularly if using NoEgg.
Honey, with the butter and sugar.
- Add egg (or substitute), vanilla essence, baking powder & flour. I tend to add the flour in 0.5 cup quantities to make mixing easier when using it by old-fashioned hand power.
Sadly you can't just have butter & sugar cookies, so better add some flour and stuff to bind it all together.
- Mix well till you have cookie dough. Try to avoid eating too much of it.
- Stir in 200g of chocolate chips and mix. I really recommend Cadbury’s dark chocolate cooking chips (not drops), it’s much better than many of the other waxy-tasting cooking chocolates I’ve tried like Nestle.
mmmmmmmm
- Melt 30g of chocolate chips in microwave.
Best part of melting chocolate is licking the melting bowl afterwards :-D
- Lightly mix melted chocolate into mixture, to generate marbling effect. Don’t mix too much, otherwise the effect will be lost and you’ll just have slightly darker cookie mix.
mmmmmm with marbeling
- Place mixture on greased trays – I tend to just roll a small handful into balls and then gently squish.
- Cook in a preheated oven at 180c for around 10-15mins. Watch the edges of the cookies, you will want to remove once the edges start going brown, leave them too long and the bottoms tend to get a bit burnt.
- Let delicious cookie aroma wash over you whilst they cool. Get excited at the sugary goodness to come.
nom nom nom nom
