Egg-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

   So....about a month ago our chickens all got snatched up by a fox...or an owl, or something else. We're not 100% sure what got them, but all our girls were gone within a few days. Just big heaps of golden feathers here and there around the farm. :(   I'm not a chicken lover like some people are (doting on their birds, naming them, giving them "special treats" like herbs in an ice water bath in the summer...seriously, that's a thing), but I did enjoy taking care of them. I enjoyed that my kids could help collect the eggs, and bring them our scrap bowl, full of leftovers that the chickens loved to eat. And for that matter, I also miss not having them as our compost. 
   
   So, where once we had at least 2 dozen eggs ready for anything, we suddenly had none...I needed to buy eggs. I haven't bought eggs in forever. We bought a few dozen from a lady Adam knows from work, and a few dozen from a lovely older lady who sells them from her scrap feed, free range chickens. 
   
   But, more often than not...we had no eggs in the house. I just wasn't used to having to buy them, so we keep going, "ohh....there aren't any eggs in the house....I guess we should go buy some?" Or, I have the urge to bake chocolate chip cookies...and there were no eggs! Yikes! 
   
   Luckily, making chocolate chip cookie dough without eggs was something I had experimented with a while ago when I made this gluten free chocolate chip cookie dough. I had worked out a lot of the kinks of edible cookie dough because I wanted to eat it raw, and eating raw eggs are not such a great idea. Unless you're a dog. Which I'm not. 
  
   Anyway, I went back to that recipe, but tweaked it to make sure it would be stable enough to bake. So, here they are, egg-free chocolate chip cookies! They are actually a really simple cookie to make, and, although my preference is a super thick, super soft cookies, these little darlings were super deee-lish. They were a little crispy on the outside, but still nice on the inside. Thumbs up. 

Egg-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

• 2/3 Cup butter, room temperature
• 1/2 Cup white sugar
• 1/2 Cup brown sugar
• 1 Tsp vanilla 
• 2 Tbsp of milk (or water, or almond milk...just something liquid!)
• 1  2/3 Cup flour
• 1 Tsp baking powder
• 1/2 Tsp salt
• 1 Cup chocolate chips 

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 350˚  
2. Put the butter into a large bowl, and whip it up with a stand mixer, a hand mixer, or arm power until it's light and fluffy
3. Add the sugars and vanilla and keep beating until it's well incorporated, and light and fluffy again. 
4. Add the milk (or whatever liquid you chose) and mix until blended
5. In a separate bowl mix the flour, salt and baking powder until they are a well blended group of ingredients
6. Now add the dry mixture to the wet, and work together with a wooden spoon or on the lowest speed of your mixer. My (current) mixer sucks, and it's low speed is still blast-flour-in-your-face fast (hard lesson learned), so now I always add my flour mixture in by hand first. Once worked in, you can use your mixer again to really get the dough whipped up nicely
7. Stir in the chocolate chips...and try not to eat too many of them  :) 
8. Using a scoop (I used my small one for these), or just a spoon, place 1 tablespoon sized scoops of cookie dough on a cookie sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes. When I made these another time, I used my medium sized scoop (which is about 2 tablespoons), and baked them for 12-13 minutes. You decide, big cookies or small!  
9. Allow to cool a few minutes on the cookie sheet before removing to a cooling rack

   I know I don't have the butter whipped up before adding the sugars in the photo above...but I wanted a picture of all the ingredients, and well, this is what you get  :)  Also, the butter is cubed because I needed it to get to room temperature quickly, and that's the way to do it. FYI. 

   So, you can see these cookies have a fantastic golden bottom, are slightly thin, but still have some puffy spots. They really are so good. Sooooo good. 

   And that's that! It's Friday, it's a "nothing" day for us here (nothing planned), so I'll be working on a wee project outside...actually, it's not "wee" at all, but if I tell myself that I won't be overwhelmed and quit!! 

   I hope everyone has a good weekend! The kids and I are heading to the Tweed Fair tomorrow, then to a Belleville Theatre Guild picnic on Sunday. I am looking forward to both! 

   
xo