Recipe:Egg-free cookies

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a sweet tooth, must be in want of some cookies. Lacking eggs, however, I decided to experiment with some egg-free recipes for cookies. Usually these are reserved for those poor poor saps with allergies and vegan sensibilities, but it turns out that they're rather nice. And remarkably quick and piss-simple to do.

Thanks to the fact there aren't eggs involved, ingredients are simply ratios. So you can make as many or as few as you like without being limited to matching up with the number of discrete eggs you're using. This is probably the main strength of this one, you can knock four cookies worth up with just a couple of spoonfuls of ingredients rather than breaking out a big mixing bowl. So, you need:

Ingredients

• One part butter.
• One part white sugar.
• One part brown sugar.
• Two parts flour.
• Splash of salt
• Honey, vanilla, chocolate chips to flavour however you like.

Method

Cream together butter and the sugar to form a stiff but smooth butter cream. You can alter the ratios of your sugars if you like, more brown to make a darker cookie at the end, more white for a paler one.

Next stir in anything for flavour. A pinch of salt is useful but not essential - just don't add two much or you end up making a salt dough. A spoonful of honey works nicely for flavour, as do small chocolate chips. One day I will try these with mini marshmallows, that would be pretty awesome.

Once that's done, sift in the flour and start combining. Add flour until the dough appears fairly dry, yet smooth, rather than sticky. To be honest, I just make it up at this point, sifting in more flour if needed to get it the right texture and adding a small splash of milk to add moisture if it's starting to resemble rock rather than dough.

Add teaspoon sized dollops of dough to a baking tray and bake for around 8-10 minutes. It's egg free so you're not really trying to cook it as such, what you're basically doing here is melting the butter and caramelising the sugar a bit. So cook them until they've melted into shape (they'll spread quite a bit), started bubbling a little as the sugar caramelises, and take them out.

They will firm up again as they cool, so after a couple of minutes they'll be okay enough to slide off the baking sheet without tearing - if you try to move them while still red hot out of the oven they will fall apart. I err on the side of them appearing underdone when they're taken out of the oven, but to be frank it's difficult to fuck these up even if you do go slightly over.

Alternative uses

Because it's egg free, you don't need to cook it. The dough can freeze and keep for quite a while, so you can nom on it quite happily if the need takes you. After all, this is effectively the same stuff you find in cookie dough ice cream so it's fine to have it "raw". This is why it doesn't particularly matter if you underdo them either.