Egg Free Cookies

One of the blogs I follow is The Baking Bookworm and I hope its okay that I put it up here as a link, because she's got some fun recipes and book reviews. And yesterday's post was about cooking for people with allergies.

As a person with a SEVERE nut allergy, I constantly have to be aware of what is in my food. Often I don't eat the yummy treats set out at school or church activities because I can't trust what is in them. Of course, I do make my own, but its always nice to get a taste of something that another person has made.

Well, Laurie's post about finding an egg-free treat took me right to a recipe that my 19 year old daughter has been baking whenever she comes home from college (I've made it but for whatever reason it tastes better when she makes it!).

The recipe is called Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cookies and it contains NO EGGS!

The original recipe calls for icing to put on top of the cookies, but honestly we've never made it that way, there is no need - the cookies are so great without it. I will include the icing recipe anyway, but believe me, simple is just great (and less work).

1/2 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup pumpkin puree (canned works just as well as fresh and = less work)
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

Preheat over to 350º and grease your cookie sheets. Personally when I can I love to use parchment paper because its so easy for clean-up.

In a medium bowl, cream the shortening and the sugar, then stir in the vanilla and pumpkin.

In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cinnamon. Stir this dry mixture slowly into the creamed mixture. Add the chocolate chips.

Drop dough onto cookie sheets, bake 10 minutes in the preheated oven. Cool one minute on the cookie sheets before putting on wire cooling rack.

The cookies don't look like much, and they don't rise a lot when they are baking, but wait until they are cooled off (really, even warm they don't taste as good) and they are amazing!

Now, if you want to make that icing I mentioned, its just a simple recipe you might have used for something else. You need:

1 - 8oz package cream cheese

1/2 cup of butter

1 pound of powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

dash of salt

Mix this all together and spread it on the cooled cookies!

This is a terrible picture so I will have her make some more this weekend and I will update this post. Sadly for my waistline, these cookies disappear quickly. Its really hard to stop eating them!!! But it will be a lovely weekend for eating cookies, I'm sure. With my cappuccino from my Magic Bullet, I'll have a delicious weekend!