What To Look For In A No-Bake Cookie Recipe

When it comes to cookie recipes, there are certain "must have" ingredients that make the whole thing possible. You've got a binder of some sort, usually flour, that holds the assemblage together. You've got a fat of some sort, that adds moistness and flavor and helps in the browning and cooking. There will usually be a leavening agent, to make the cookie puff up and look right and eat properly. And, of course, you'll have a flavoring of some sort, running the gamut from peanut butter and chocolate chips to more exotic things like anise or poppy seed. The no-bake cookie recipe has some of these, but not all.

First off, very few of the ingredients will be in raw form. Thus, you'll have no raw eggs, very little flour and no leavening agents. Since these cookies will not be baked, eggs would simply make the no bake cookies dangerous, and leavening agents wouldn't have the heat they need to work properly.

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You may find other cookies or baked goods actually used as flour would be used in a regular cookie recipe. For instance, vanilla wafer cookies, ground or chopped, are often used as the binder for shaped items like baseball cookies.

Even if cookies are not used to make the cookies, some form of finished product will usually find its way into the recipe. Take haystack cookies, that perennial holiday cookie basket favorite, which use chow mein noodles to form the haystack shape and bind together the peanut butter and butterscotch or chocolate. Graham crackers, with their fairly light flavor and sweet finish, are often used. Some recipes even use powdered sugar as "flour," which makes sense from a structural standpoint.

One thing you'll almost never find is a "lightly sweet" no-bake cookie recipe. Almost all of them are very heavy on the sugar, honey, peanut butter, chocolate or other sweet source. Without the subtle chemical reactions of baking, the sugar has to carry the day.

What To Look For In A No-Bake Cookie Recipe

Ann Marie Krause has been making cookies for over 30 years, at persent I am retired, for over 23 years I owned a Gourmet Bakery called The Cheese Confectioner.You can visit my site at http://www.annsgoodies.com

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