Chocolate chip cookies, eggless

Original recipe source - DessertForTwo

Few notes -

1. Modified the recipe from the original to suit the standard butter stick and 1oz mark for cream cheese, it helps with my pantry management. :)
2. I've noticed that the cookies turn out a bit brown if I bake for 9 min, so might reduce baking time next time to 7min, and remove from cookie sheet immediately for cooling
3. I use Ghirardelli chocolate chips.
4. I tried the same recipe with whole wheat flour. I felt it was a little dry, so might reduce the flour by 1Tbsp next time. 

Peanut butter cookies, eggless

Original recipe link - Flavor Mosaic's Best old-fashioned eggless peanut butter cookies

Berry Crumble

I love a good crumble, the goodness of butter and toasted flour, the sweetness of the berries underneath and the overall package of decadence, though it can all be healthy... I was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and saw a recipe for Crumble, and bingo. What I thought was a complicated dessert was actually a very simple one.

The recipe mentioned in the book uses white flour, and more sugar. I used this recipe, developed from various sources on the internet and this worked.

I ate the crumble a day after it was baked. The tartness in the raspberries was all gone, and it was delicious.

When I do this next, I'll not be using Raspberries or blackberries, though. Both these berries have seeds in them, which change the texture of the crumble. May be just Blueberries, apple or strawberries from the next time.

Biskoot, as we call it…

As mentioned in my previous post, Mom and Maami were visiting us earlier this month.
My Maami is this super-awesome-homemaker-cook-woman who is like the encyclopedia for anything related to Udupi Brahmin cooking. All our cooking prowess can be directly or indirectly attributed to her, and we still refer to her when in doubt for anything related to Tulu cooking. So when she was visiting, I had a list ready - a list of all the things I'd ask her to make for me , stuff that I've been craving for a zillion years. Mom ensured that we had the raw material (some of the stuff isn't readily available in Hyderabad and they got it all from Hidingala, our hometown), and together they cooked them all for me.

This is one of such awesome but simple dishes only my Maami can make. Yes, its not a traditional Udupi dish (yeah, her repertoire of dishes is vast, as I discovered recently), but we literally grew up on these biscuits(pronounced Biskoot, just for the Tulu touch :) ). The recipe has been handed down from generations of housewives, I believe, and is one of the simplest methods to bake a biscuit or a cookie, in this case.

Lemon Cranberry Shortbread cookies

Ever since I started getting full cream milk, and making my own butter the house is full of it. Cream and butter, that is. And we are now using butter in everything we’d otherwise use ghee in, but that is still not a good enough demand for our excess supply! :) So I guess, all my recipes henceforth will be using white butter, and I have a feeling am slowly turning into my mother… but that’s a long story for another day! :)

These Lemon Cranberry Shortbread cookies are the first to use white butter… and you can feel the taste of butter through these.

Cardamom Cookies … easiest ever!

Last week, I had some family visiting for tea, and had nothing at home to serve them. I wasn’t in a mood for regular chocolate cookies and since I had already made some shortbread cookies, was looking for something sweet to pair with the tea and those savoury cookies. Some flipping through my archives and visiting some blogs gave me Nags’ recipe for Almond Cardamom cookies.

Since I didn’t have almonds at hand, and had no patience to run to the store, I decided to substitute them with sunflower seeds , which worked great. To give a slight almond flavour, I used some pure almond extract. Also, the original recipe had way too much butter in it, which I reduced slightly, to fit my ideal butter measure, a 100gm butter bar. :-)

Peanut Butter Cookies

Ever since I made the Peanut Butter at home, I’ve not been able to get it out of my head. In order to satiate this peanut butter craving, and also to make something sweet for my dessert-loving Father-in-law, I decided to make Peanut butter cookies.



I took this recipe as an inspiration, and modified it a bit to make it eggless and more peanut butter-y. It took me 20 min to put together the entire cookie dough and another 10 min per batch to bake it. In short, in exactly 30 min, I had warm cookies , which both FIL and I relished as our after-dinner snack. :-)

Weekend baking… Savoury Shortbread cookies

This morning I was craving for something savoury. And I wanted to bake it, coz Mom is around , so I wanted to show off my baking skills to her. :-)


Hence these cookies. I followed the basic shortbread method, but didn’t add sugar to this. The herbs I used in this recipe are indicative only, and can be replaced with anything your taste buds ask for. My next trial will be with Oregano and Rosemary , and different peppers for the spicy taste.

Mocha Choco-chip cookies

Tonight was crave-for-chocolate evening, what with me craving for chocolate and hence eating the baking chocolate chips since evening. I decided to go ahead and bake myself some cookies, something I haven't done in a long long time, because of the enormous amount of butter involved in it.

I modified this recipe by Chef in You to suit my mood and taste, and baked Mocha-Choco chip cookies, with a slight coffee flavour and a lot of chocolate oozing in it. I kept the flour, soda and liquid ratio same as the one in this recipe, but I altered the ingredients to make this eggless, and to use date syrup, something which I’ve been wanting to try instead of sugar for a while now.

Chocolate Choco chip cookie

 

Oh well, I’ve heard the whole buzz about chocolate chip cookies and a warm/cold cup of milk to go with it, and I’ve never really got it. Okay, so its a cookie and that’s a glass of milk. What’s the big deal, right? Well, no. As I found out through experience just a while ago, chocolate chip cookies DO really go well with a cold cup of milk, and the best thing to have on a weekend morning! :)

So there was this whole what’s-the-deal-with-choco-chip-cookies and also this tea party that a friend is hosting this evening. Two good reasons to dunk in a whole lot of butter, and I thought why-not!

I took a basic recipe of chocolate chip cookie, and modified it slightly to make it eggless, and more chocolatey.

Ingredients
125 gms dark baking chocolate bar
2 cups AP flour
2/3 cup Cadbury’s cocoa powder
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
200 gms butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup while sugar
4 tbsp thick cream
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 cup chocolate chips

Instructions
Melt the dark chocolate in a microwave for 50 secs and temper it well enough, set it aside to cool.
Pre-heat the oven to 185C.
Sieve the flour with cocoa powder, salt and baking soda.
In another bowl, cream the butter with the sugars. Add cream and melted chocolate to this mixture, and mix well. Now add the vanilla essence and mix well.
To this butter mixture, add the flours and mix well enough. Fold in the chocolate chips.
Pour dollops of this batter on a parchment paper and a cookie sheet , and bake for 14mins.
Let the cookies cool on a wire rack.

And yes, whatever is left off the batter in the  bowl, please lick it off. :-D

These measurements yielded ~30 mid-sized cookies.

Oatmeal Cranberry cookies

 

What do you get when you put a woman in a house full of dried fruit and similar baking stuff (Thank you, US trip! :)). Add a hint of not-bad-but-good-loneliness , some boredom , a happy mood and a huge appetite for eating good food to the situation. Yes, you get Oatmeal cranberry cookies, with dark chocolate chips in it!

I got a lot of dried fruit stuff from US this month, a friend got me SilPat, and I was itching to make something. Bake some cookies may be, and make them healthy so I can eat them as a mid-meal-snack without feeling guilty. 

Today looked perfect. As I returned home from work, I saw that the weather was good, and after the almost-hurricane-like-wind, it was cool gentle breeze flowing into the house, I was reading a book sitting on the couch and thought, why not today!

A quick search for a Oatmeal cranberry cookie recipe led me to one of my favourite food-blogs – Madhuram (the name means sweet in Telugu). I checked that I had all the ingredients at hand. Since the intention was to get an eggless one and not a vegan recipe (I still am miles away from turning into one!) , I made some minor changes to the original recipe.

Ingredients

75 gms butter (I used 3/4 off the 100gm Amul butter bar)
1/3 cup Granulated Sugar
3/4 cup Brown Sugar
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
1/2 cup milk
1 cup whole wheat Flour
1/2 teaspoon Baking Soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
3 cups Quick Cooking Oats
1 cup Dried Cranberries
1 cup dark chocolate chips (Optional, but then who doesn't like chocolate!)

Yeah yeah, I know that’s a lot of butter for someone who is on a perennial lose-weight-diet, but then I didn’t say I wanted a fat-free recipe. I wanted a healthy one. :-P

Instructions

Pre-heat the oven at 185C and meanwhile mix up the ingredients.

Cream the butter, and add the sugars to it. Once its well blended, add the vanilla extract and milk and mix well.
Sieve the flour well with baking soda and cinnamon powder, and mix this into the butter mixture.
Now add the oats, cranberries and chocolate chips to this and mix.

Make 1-rupee-sized balls of this cookie dough and press them slightly on the greased cookie sheet with a fork. I generally use parchment paper on my cookie sheet, and I had the Silpat also today.

Bake for at least 12mins at 185 C , if you want them slightly crunchy let it stay for 14mins.

Take them off the oven, and wait till they cool. And if you are like me who cannot wait, please let your teeth dig into the cookies! :-)

Now that I think of it, I have started to feel guilty about all that butter. But what the heck. Remember, I told I am a happy soul these days, and I deserve some butter! :-D

Mamma, am coming home…

 

Yes, I was going to Mom’s house after 3 months, and during this period I had started baking. Mom, who is someone who has never asked for anything special to eat for herself so far, actually asked me to make something for her.

So the day before I was to leave to her place, I started baking at 7 and finished by 11 :)
I baked her a Paneer Cake, Ukranian Tea Cake, Chocolate Brownies and Peanut Butter Cookies, and she loved them all! :D

Peanut Butter Choco-chip cookies

Ever since I read on JoyTheBaker’s blog about Peanut butter and chocolate together, I have been drooling. No, am not kidding. I have been literally thinking about how awesome peanut butter would taste if I make a brownie with it or a cake with it and so on…

For someone who has discovered peanut butter very recently(just about an  year ago), I have taken to it like its my staple diet. If I was not worried about the fat I’d pile on with all that eating of PB, I’d probably have it everyday for breakfast and lunch and dinner also. Yes, thats how much I love PB. And every time I have it with jam and bread for breakfast, I remember the taste the whole day and grin to myself. Yes, the way I love PB is just weird!

So imagine how much I’d have been craving and thinking about PB being in one of the baked dessert items. Yes, it was on my head ever since I read that post.

Just the other day, I came home frantically wanting to make something with PB. I rushed through my bookmarked recipes and found this recipe(the one listed at the bottom of this post, under Recipe Courtesy) . And I was about to start making it, when I realized I had run out of baking soda. Aaaaah! The horror! So I ended up making Dark Chocolate brownies, which turned out to be heavenly and is a totally different story. But remember, my PB craving has not been satiated yet.

As much as I loved the thought of the Dark Choc brownie around me – in my fridge, in my tummy, in my mouth – anywhere, I was waiting for it to be finished, so I could try something with PB. Yes, I have to wait for one dish to finish before I start baking another, this is the only way I can kill the guilt that eats me up!

Going to Mom’s house came as the perfect opportunity, and I jumped to it. That was when this awesome cookie was baked, and was loved by both of us. (For the total non-dessert eater that S was, its sad how I have changed him. He eats everything I try and gives me very constructive criticism if its gone bad and reaches out for the second piece every single time :D)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1/8 cup water
1/2 cup oil 
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup semisweet mini chocolate chips
8 spoons of milk(If the batter is too dry, mix spoon by spoon)

Procedure:
1. The usual drill – pre-heat the oven to 200C and prepare your baking sheet. Mine is as usual foil wrapped on my grill
2. In a large mixing bowl, mix the peanut butter with the sugars, water, oil and vanilla extract
3. Sieve the flours with baking powder, baking soda and salt
4. Pour the flour mixture into the wet ingredients mixture and mix just enough
5. If you see that the mixture is too dry for you to roll the dough into balls, add spoon by spoon of milk into the batter, till you see the right consistency (This piece of advice came as a life-saver from N at the right minute for me)
6. Add the choco chips to this mixture and do not over-mix
7. On the baking sheet, take a spoonful of the dough and roll it into a small round ball. Flatten it on the sheet. If you would like to beautify it, do so with fork impressions, which is what I did.
8. Bake this for about 20 mins at 200C and flip the cookies to ensure that the other side is baked as well
9. Bake the other side for about 10 mins at 185C

This cookie does not melt in the mouth as I have seen, but it tastes brilliant. The PB taste is not too much to overpower your other taste buds, but is still distinctly felt. On cooling, this cookie does turn out to be a little hard, but I am okay with it, since the overall fat content of this cookie is way lesser than the other pure-butter ones. And next time I try this, I am going to do this with whole-wheat flour.

Recipe from – My Diverse Kitchen

Espresso choco chip shortbread cookies

 

Now, cookies are something I always see on blogs, drool  upon, wonder if I should try them and tell myself that I can never pull them off and close the blog dejectedly. In addition to my doubts on my baking capabilities, there is one more reason. I can never afford to eat that much butter. The amount of butter in the cookies is just plain… humongous! And there is no way on earth I can make and eat them and not feel guilty.

But this one particular evening, after having had loads of cookie discussions with friends on Twitter, and after having stared at this recipe page (link in the Recipe courtesy below) for a considerable amount of time, I decided I will try baking this one.
So what if it uses an entire butter stick! (Too scared of the amount of butter in this, I decided to halve the portions, though)

Oh but then, I knew I was having guests who were to stay over, so I thought I’ll bake these cookies for morning coffee and impress them.

Ingredients:

1/2 tablespoon instant espresso powder(Nescafe it is!)
1/2 tablespoon boiling water
1 sticks (4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature(I used 100g of Amul butter)
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup store-bought mini chocolate chips
 

Procedure

1. No need to preheat the oven now :)
2. Mix the espresso powder with the hot water to make strong coffee and set it aside to cool
3. In a large mixing bowl, mix the butter and the sugar well enough to make a smooth mixture. Add the coffee and the vanilla essence to this mixture
4. Add the flour to this mixture and mix just enough

5. Take a small sized zip lock bag and transfer the batter into the bag. Lay it on the counter and even it out carefully, so that there are no creases in the plastic sheet. Also be careful to not let the batter out of the bag. Once the batter is spread evenly to all corners of the bag and is of even thickness, close the bag and put this in the refrigerator

6. I let this bag be in the fridge overnight, and removed it the next morning
7. Preheat the oven to 200C and line up the baking sheet. I wrap my grill with aluminium foil and use that as the baking sheet. Gives me a lot of space. Yet again, a friend gave me this idea.
8. Cut open the plastic bag, and cut even squares of the batter

8. Put these on the baking sheet atleast 2 inches apart from each other and bake them at 185C for about 15 mins.
9. I had to flip the cookies and bake the other side for 4 mins too

10. Did you spot a mistake that I did here? Well, I turned lazy midway and tried putting as many cookies as possible on the sheet, and see what happened. Luckily, this wasnt a huge mistake, and I could easily break off the cookies that were stuck to each other

We enjoyed them in the balcony with lots of conversations, and had a great time. But there is no way I am going to bake these cookies all for ourselves. I even gave away half the amount of cookies to S’s colleagues. They were addictive and we were scared we’d eat them up ourselves and then roll over in guilt :)

Recipe Courtesy : Smitten Kitchen (Check out her photos. They are enough to make you drool!)