Eggless Butter Cookies

“Sometimes me thinks, what is a friend?

And then me say.

Friend is someone to share last cookie with.”

~Cookie monster

How true is the wisdom of the little Muppet called Cookie monster. We should share our cookies with our friends, but when cookies are as tasty as these butter cookies, sharing becomes really really difficult. I am an absolute cookie/biscuit lover. Ah! The pleasure of dunking a biscuit into tea or milk. As kids, we could eat up entire packets of biscuits in a single go. My sister recently remembered that there was a time when she was given tea but there were no biscuits and she was confused on as how to have tea without any biscuits to accompany it. This was apparently the reason why my mom ended up restricting out biscuit consumption to 4 a day. My love story with cookies has come a long way now, instead of just eating them, I’ve moved on to baking them.

I saw some awesome cookie recipes recently and really wanted to try them out. But they all contained eggs, and as I am an eggless baker I had to improvise. I did take the basic recipe and modify it a little to come up with what’s below. Previously, when I made cookies, I added some leavening agents to it. The difference here is, there is no leavening agent whatsoever. This makes the cookies crisp and they don’t end up being cakey. The only advice I have is do not skimp on the butter. The butter is essential to give the cookies their correct texture.

Eggless Butter Cookies

"Light and crunchy Butter Cookies made without using Eggs"

Recipe Type:  Dessert
Cuisine:          International
Prep Time:     30 minutes
Cook time:     2 Hours (Considering 6 batches)
Yield:              40-50

Ingredients:

120 gms unsalted Butter
80 gms Sugar (powdered or icing)
30 gms Corn flour
120 gms Flour / Maida
½ tsp Vanilla essence
½ tsp Salt
2 Tbsp Milk

Method:

• The butter needs to be very soft. I left it out on the counter overnight. 
• Preheat the oven to 170 degree Celsius. 
• Add the sugar and salt to the butter. Start with around 60 gms and then add more depending on the sweetness of the sugar and your taste. I like my cookies sweet and the sugar I had was very mild, so I used up all the sugar. 
• Beat/ whisk it until it is almost 4-5 times the volume. This will take around 10 mins with a hand mixer. 
• Sift the corn flour and the flour together. 
• Add the flour in 3 additions to the butter mix along with the vanilla essence and milk, and beat until just mixed. Do not over-mix this. 
• Line a cookie sheet with butter paper. 
• Fill the cookie dough in a piping bag with a star nozzle and pipe out swirls. 
• Space them at least 1-1.5 cm apart as they will flatten and spread out while baking. 
• Bake for around 13-15 mins until the sides of the cookies are slightly brown. Mine took 14 mins. Wait for around 5 mins and then move them to a wire rack as they are very fragile when you remove them from the oven. 
• The recipe made many many cookies :) Somewhere around 50 (I really did not count) but I have a tiny oven and I had to pipe out 6 batches. Don’t be overwhelmed by the number and decide to cut down the recipe to make less, cause they are sooo delicate and melt-in-your-mouth cookies that you won’t even realize where the 50 or so just disappeared :) 

Notes:

I made 4 batches of regular butter cookies. To the remaining dough I added 2.5 tbsp of dried desiccated coconut. If you plan to do so, add a little more milk, else the dough becomes very hard and difficult to pipe. You can top it with dry fruits like raisins or almonds.