EPIC Chocolate Chip Cookies

These eggless chocolate chip cookies are flawless! Crisp exterior, fudgy center and oozing chocolate – you won’t stop at one!

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Some of you may know, that while I share (mostly) eggless recipes, I’m not actually averse to using eggs in real life. When I first started baking, just like everyone else, I believed strongly that eggs were integral to baking. However, pretty soon after I’d moved back to India, and started catering to orders, I realized that there was a very strong demand for “eggless goods.”

The switch wasn’t very difficult. I was already accustomed to making some recipes without eggs for my family but I was very clear, that when eliminating eggs from a recipe, it had to still have the same taste, texture and appearance that it did when made using eggs.  

This made cracking some recipes really difficult. Brownies is one of them. But that’s a story for another day.   This post is dedicated to my quest to finding the perfect egg-free chocolate chip cookie. So let’s see. What was I trying to do – create a good (no, scratch that) GREAT chocolate cookie that had

• a crisp exterior
• a chewy center
• warm goey pools of chocolate
• used only pantry staples and not “flax eggs” or “aquafaba” or any of those fancy “egg replacements.”
• Looked like a real cookie. By that I mean this

 And, of course it also had to be super simple to make. Maybe now I’m getting a sense of why my husband calls me high maintenance 😀

Anyhoo, I was determined to crack this, and given that my past attempts had proved futile, I wasn’t very convinced. So for 2 days I hunkered down, read, browsed, made notes, and experimented.

Finally cracked it – after a mountain of cookies and on the 9^th trial! I will spare you the details of all my experiments and just share the recipe of the perfect cookie with you. Coz that’s what you’re here for!

The recipe needs really simple ingredients and no special techniques.

Butter
Caster Sugar
Brown Sugar
Milk
Vanilla Extract
Flour
Baking Powder
Baking Soda
Chocolate Chips/Chunks

That’s it! Let’s take a look at the steps now.

We start by beating the softened butter. Beat for a minute. Do not use melted butter or hard butter. Leave your butter out on the counter a few hours before you make this. Using an electric beater helps in making the butter light and airy, but you can also use a hand whisk and work those muscles a bit! 

Add both the sugars together and beat again.

Add the milk and vanilla. You may skip the vanilla but it just elevates the recipe! Don’t worry if the mix appears curdled, it will settle when you add the flour.  

Next, sift in the flour, baking powder and baking soda. Mix well and ensure there are no clumps of flour. 

If you have measured the ingredients correctly, you should now get a soft, non-sticky dough. If the dough feels too dry, add another tsp of milk. If it feels sticky, add a little extra flour.  

Add the chocolate. Use chips, or chunks of your favorite baking chocolate and mix till the chocolate is distributed evenly. Don’t mix it too hard because you don’t want the chocolate to melt and meld with the dough completely. 

Next, scoop the dough (I used an ice-cream scoop) because it makes the most beautiful looking cookie dough balls onto a parchment lined (or greased) tray, and put it away in the fridge for atleast one hour. This is important to develop flavor as well as for the dough to firm up a bit or they’ll spread too much in the oven. You can leave this dough in the fridge for longer – upto 24 hours. There’s no need to thaw when you plan to bake. Directly pop into the pre-heated oven and bake!

BAKING THE COOKIES
Bigger cookies mean more baking time. If you use a smaller scoop or another tool that gives you smaller balls of the dough, you may need to cut off a few minutes from your total baking time. Mine got done at exactly 14 minutes. If you like crisper cookies, bake longer. About half-way through the baking, (8 minutes for me) I took out the tray from the oven, and quickly added more chocolate to the top of the cookies before continuing baking.

This gave the cookies the characteristic pools of chocolate on top that ARE SIMPLY AMAZING. You may skip this step but then, who doesn’t want more chocolate right? 

Allow the cookies to cool for 5-10 minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack to cool completely. You can add some sea salt (like I did) when the cookies are still warm because sea salt just makes everything 100 times better!!