Egg-Free Cookie Dough

I like cookies.

I do. I prefer them to cake, for instance. There are few things more indulgently delectable than a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven, served with a tall glass of milk (or bowl of vanilla ice cream).

But do you know what I honestly sort of like more than cookies?

Cookie dough.

Yes. My cookie recipes never make quite as many cookies as advertised, because I eat several cookies' worth of dough.

I do not discriminate in my love of raw baked goods--my brownie pan is never quite as full as it should be by the time I'm done spooning tastes out of the batter, and cake batter is far, far superior in every way to finished cake.

I tend to pooh-pooh my way past raw egg warnings. Doughs and batters, fresh Caesar salad dressing and homemade mayonnaise--I enjoy them all with nary a thought to spare for food poisoning.

Now that I'm pregnant, however, I have resigned myself to a more cautious approach to food. Goodbye, alcohol; goodbye, sushi; goodbye, cookie dough.

Until the internet graced me with a recipe for egg-free dough, of course.

Yes, please.

Egg-Free Cookie Dough
Adapted from this recipe at DisneyFamily.com; this recipe from Love & Olive Oil is similar, but requires more ingredients and I haven't actually bothered with it yet. Note that normal people use these recipes to form adorable little cookie dough balls that they drizzle/coat in chocolate and serve on fancy platters at parties. I just stick the bowl of dough in my fridge to eat as the mood strikes me.

Soften 1 cup (two sticks) butter by leaving it out on the counter for an hour, or hacking at it with a knife for fifteen minutes, or, if you like to live life on the edge, microwaving in 5-10 second intervals.

I bought a one pound block of butter from a local dairy,
so it wasn't in neat little sticks. If you, too, lack stick butter,
remember that 1 pound = 2 cups = 4 sticks.
So this is a half pound of butter (aka 1 cup aka 2 sticks)
 in pieces that I hacked apart and weighed on my kitchen scale.

You should be able to easily leave a thumbprint in softened butter, but it should not be in any way melty or liquid.

Thumbprint.

Put your butter in a large mixing bowl, one that will happily accommodate a beater. A deep bowl is a good idea, as butter and sugar in a wide, shallow bowl will go flinging about your kitchen and into your hair. Not that I know this from personal experience or anything.

Add to your butter 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar.

Sugar and butter.

Cream your butter and sugar together. This means beat it with your beater until it's a creamy, coherent substance. The DDH is exceptionally good at this, and the batch he made was smoother and more delightful than the one I did. I tend to get impatient and stop before everything is really and truly creamed, leading to a grainier (and, after being refrigerated, harder) finished dough.

This is okay, but another two minutes would make it better.

Add 1 tsp. vanilla extract

Vanilla.

and 1 1/2 to 2 cups flour. I add a cup, mix it in, then add more until it's the consistency I like. When you're making dough to bake, you want to be careful not to overmix the flour, as this will make for tough cookies. But if you're just eating the dough, it doesn't matter as much.

Flour.

Once your dough is mixed and the consistency you like,

Dough!

add 1 to 2 cups chocolate chips. In other words, add chocolate chips to taste, or according to how big your chips are or how many you have left.

This is a bit less than a cup of chips.

Mix together and enjoy!

No need for baking.

The dough will keep in the fridge for a week or so, not that it's ever stuck around that long at my house. To help keep your leftovers soft, press plastic wrap directly onto the surface of the dough.

You can of course form this dough into balls, drizzle and coat with chocolate, and take them to a fancy party.

But I won't tell if you just eat it all with a spoon straight from the bowl. ;-)

No-Bake Strawberry Pie

Chocolate. Strawberries. Cream.

A magical combination. And even better--you don't ever have to turn on the oven to get it.

If you're looking for a way to showcase fresh spring berries in a quick, creamy, refreshing dessert, this recipe is for you.

Even with whipping fresh cream and photodocumenting the process (and a Very Important Pause to make sure my Wordfeud didn't time out and force me to forfeit to the DDH again), making the pie took exactly an hour (though it is supposed to chilled for thirty minutes before serving).

You can use whipped topping from the freezer aisle if you must, but trust me that freshly whipped cream is worth the extra step.

Yum.

No-Bake Fresh Strawberry Pie
Adapted from Cooking Light May 2012.
Serves eight.

Process approximately 2 cups chocolate animal crackers or other chocolate cookies or wafers in your food processor until finely ground.

Goodbye, little animals.

Ground cookies.

Melt 3 oz. chocolate chips or finely chopped baking chocolate and 2 tsp. coconut oil in the microwave for 45 seconds or until chocolate is melted, stirring every 15 seconds. (You can use canola or vegetable oil instead of coconut oil, but then you don't need to melt it. Just stir it into the melted chocolate before adding to the cookie crumbs.)

Chocolate.

Plus coconut oil.

Add melted chocolate mixture to the cookie crumbs in the food processor.

Process until well combined. At this stage, it looks like nothing so much as damp dirt.
 

Delicious, delicious dirt.

Gently press the mixture into the bottom and sides of a greased 9-inch pie plate and freeze for 15 minutes or until set. Mine was very crumbly and did not hold together particularly well. Once set, it did hold together better, but still makes a crumbly crust--which is not a bad thing, in my opinion, for a cookie pie crust.

Don't forget to grease the pan.

Dirt pie.

Beat 6 oz. cream cheese, 1/3 cup powdered sugar, and 3/4 tsp. vanilla extract on medium speed until smooth.

Cream cheese, sugar, vanilla.

Smooth and fluffy.

Place 1 cup heavy cream in a large bowl. Add a few splashes of vanilla extract and, if desired, several tablespoons sugar. I think the pie is sweet enough to use unsweetened cream, but do it to taste.

Yes, this is 2 cups. The recipe calls for two cups whipped, and 2 cups unwhipped makes way more than that. Luckily, I had extra strawberries and used the extra cream for dipping.

 

 

Vanilla cream.

To do this, place the cream in a bowl and beat on medium high speed for about five minutes. At first, it will sort of splash around and make a mess. Then, it starts to froth, and then it becomes a thicker liquid. Keep going. It will reach the melty-whipped-cream stage. Keep going. This pretty much always takes right at about five minutes. You will know when it's done--it will keep its peaked shape when you pull the blades out and will be thick like, well, whipped cream.

Like this.

Once you have your whipped cream, fold it into the cream cheese mixture. Plop about half of the whipped cream on top of the cream cheese. Dig a spatula under the cream cheese and fold it up over the whipped cream. Do this several times, then add the rest of the whipped cream and repeat a few more times.

Scoop and fold.

Whipped cream folded into cream cheese won't be thoroughly blended, exactly, just mixed together loosely.

Carefully spread the cream mixture over the crust and set in the freezer while you do the next bit.

Ready for the freezer.

Microwave 2 Tbs. strawberry jam or jelly for 10 seconds or until softened. Add 1/2 tsp. lemon juice and 1 Tbs. fruit-flavored liqueur (optional) such as Chambord. Whisk until smooth.

Jam in the microwave.

Melted and stirred with lemon juice.

Add 1 pound strawberries, hulled and halved (you can leave very small berries whole)

Halved.

and toss to combine.

Yum.

 Pull the pie back out of the freezer and arrange the berry halves on top. Chill for 30 minutes before serving.

Somehow I neglected to take a picture of the finished pie! In my defense, I still had dip to mix, veggies to chop, and agendas to print before getting to my meeting.

And there were not any leftovers.

Chocolate Chip Red Velvet Cookies with Cream Cheese Frosting

The DDH's favorite cake is red velvet with cream cheese frosting.

I mean, it's really just chocolate, but somehow the red makes it taste special, y'know?

I'm not a particular fan of cake, but then the Roommate brought home some red velvet with cream cheese frosting cookies from the store.

They were those big fluffy Lofthouse-style cookies with a thick layer of cream cheese-flavored icing. And they were not bad.

But I knew I could make them better.

So I trolled the internet and found this recipe first. They looked pretty delicious, but no way was I going to buy a cake mix in order to make homemade cookies. That's dumb, y'all. The cream cheese frosting, though, seemed like a win. It at least gave me a method and ingredients.

Poking about further on Google led me to this recipe for really homemade red velvet cookies. Chocolate chip red velvet cookies, even. I was encouraged that she described them as chewy and cookie-y versus cakey, the way both the Lofthouse cookies and, I'm sure, the cake-mix version were. But she didn't include any cream cheese frosting, which seemed like a fatal oversight.

So I combined them.

It was supposed to be for Valentine's Day for the DDH, but I ended up with a migraine that Monday night and didn't get them made. So instead they were a welcome home present.

And a successful one. ^_^

One recipe, three styles.

Chocolate Chip Red Velvet Cookies with Cream Cheese Frosting

Note: Your cream cheese should be room temperature when you make the frosting, so get that out ahead of time.

This recipe has you make the frosting ahead of time, freeze it for at least two hours, and then use it as a filling for the cookies. That would probably be the most delicious thing ever. I didn't have time to do that, so I made it while the first batch of cookies was cooking and ended up using it three ways:

1. Spread thickly on cooled cookies, like you would ice a cake.
2. Spread onto hot-out-of-the-oven cookies, so it melted and became more glaze-like.
3. Pressed an indentation into not-yet-baked cookies, filled indentation with icing, put a little extra dough on top, and baked thusly. This was the closest to the filled cookie version, obviously, and my favorite.

So depending on your time constraints and cookie/icing preferences, you may want to make the icing in advance, before/while you're mixing up the cookies, or while they're baking for use afterward.

For the Cookies:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

In a large bowl, beat together 1/2 cup (one stick) butter, 1/2 cup white sugar, and 1/2 cup brown sugar until fluffy.

From this...

...to this. Or that's how I interpret "fluffy," anyway.

Add 1 egg and 1 tsp. vanilla and beat until smooth.

From this...

...to this.

Don't let the spatula in the pictures fool you; I'm using an electric hand beater here. And you will need to kick up to medium or high speed in both the previous steps.

Beat in 1 tsp. red food coloring. If you look at the original recipe, you will notice that her cookies turned out bright red, even after being baked. Mine didn't. They were more of a red-tinged chocolate color. So if you want bright red cookies, you may want to add more food coloring, or maybe try adding some after you add the cocoa if they're not still red enough. Because obviously they were really red at this point.

Blood cookies.

It's hard to tell in the picture, but it was bright! red! at this point.

In a separate bowl, combine 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/3 cup cocoa powder, 1 tsp. baking soda, and 1/4 tsp. salt.

From this...

...to this.

Stir flour mixture into butter/egg mixture until just combined.

This dough is really thick and stiff, and I think I had to use a beater.

Fold in 1/2 cup chocolate chips. Toss in a few extra for good measure.

From this...

...to this. And you can't use a beater or you'll break up the chips.

Scoop balls of dough onto a cookie sheet. I tried several sizes, and all came out tasty after ten minutes, though the smaller ones are a little harder.

Small.

Medium.

As mentioned in the note, I took some of the cookies (these were the largest), and made thumbprint indentions in the middle,

It's hard to tell.

filled the indention with icing,

Yum.

and stole some dough from the edges of the cookie to press on top of the icing.

A semi-filled cookie.

Bake 10-12 minutes (ten turned out perfectly in my oven). Let sit on the pan for a minute (now would be when to spread the icing on if you want it glaze-y),

Small glaze-y cookies. Not really as thin as a glaze, but melty.

then transfer to a wire rack to cool (after which you can ice them for a cake/Lofthouse cookie effect).

Medium Lofthouse-style cookies.

And here's how the big ones turned out:

On the tray.

The icing browned slightly at the tips.

For the Frosting:

Beat 8 oz. (one brick) more-or-less room temperature cream cheese with 2 cups powdered sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla.

There's cream cheese under there somewhere.

Taste and beat in more sugar or vanilla to taste.

Just right.

I liked mine less sweet (2 1/2 cups sugar : 8 oz. cream cheese); the original recipe called for 2 cups sugar : 4 oz. cream cheese, but I think 4 cups for 8 oz would have been too sweet.

This frosting is amazing. I was eating it right out of the bowl (it also makes way more than you really need for the cookies and you would be fine halving it, I suspect). It's tangy and creamy like the cream cheese and not too sweet, with that back-of-the-tongue vanilla taste...nom nom nom. So much better than cream-cheese-flavored store-bought frosting. SO MUCH BETTER.

Conclusion

I ate so much dough and icing that I'm not sure I ever even tried a finished cookie--but the dough and incing were good! ^_~

The DDH loved them, especially the icing. He kept adding more to the already-thickly-frosted cookies.

"That's the right amount of icing."

They are not super-bright red, but they're still reddish. And you can't really argue with a double-chocolate cookie with homemade cream cheese icing, no matter what color they are. :-)

These cookies are definitely best warm--though what cookie isn't? I'll have to fiddle with the recipe to see if I can make them fudgier and chewier, as they end up being just a touch dry (though maybe that's a good thing against the frosting?).

Also, remember that you'll want to refrigerate them if they're going to hang around more than a day or so!