This is my 3rd entry for the Egg Replacement Event – Egg Replacer Powder hosted by me.

Few months back I had baked eggless butter pecan cookies using instant butterscotch pudding mix, which was a big hit. These pudding cookies are very easy to put together and taste very good. You don’t need eggs, baking soda, baking powder or sugar. With only 3 ingredients (nuts optional) butter, pudding mix and flour you can bake these amazing pudding cookies in no time. If you are interested in baking but have not baked before this is “the recipe” you should try. Nothing can go wrong and I guarantee that everybody who taste these cookies will be asking you for the recipe.

Since it’s Christmas season, I’ve decided to bake goodies and give it to the people in my community, like the firefighters, ER workers, librarians, post men, etc. So I decided to bake these pudding cookies in 3 different flavors, create an assorted cookie tray and hand it over to some of them.

This time I tried the instant pistachio pudding mix and french vanilla flavors. Simply follow the butter pecan cookies recipe and substitute the butterscotch pudding mix with pistachio pudding mix for 1 batch and french vanilla pudding mix for another batch. Also substitute the pecans with chopped pistachios and mini semi sweet chocolate chips respectively.

The 2 changes I made this time was:

1 Toasting the nuts before adding it to the dough. This gave a nice crunch to the cookies. Toast the nuts in the oven itself while it is preheating.

2 Shaping the dough into balls and then flattening it with my palm. For this I first dropped tablespoonsful of dough on the baking sheets. I got 21 cookies for each mix. Then I greased my hands by with little butter (from the butter wrapper) and then rolled each into ball and then flattened it by pressing it with my palm. So this time I got beautiful round cookies for all the batches. Last time I just dropped a tablespoonful of dough and used a fork to press it down.

These cookies go to
1. Sharmi’s Cookie Baking Event.
2. Happy Cook’s Homemade Christmas Gifts.
3. JZ’s Santa’s Holiday Challenge.
4. Vandana’s Baking for Beginners.
5. Susan’s Eat Christmas Cookies. Check here for cookies from around the world.

Yesterday there was the annual Christmas party in my husband’s office. I wanted to bake something special and not very time consuming also. Long time back I had preserved a recipe for cookie bars which came with a condensed milk can. I thought it should be perfect because it was simply layering of ingredients, baking and then cutting them into bars. But the only drawback, I gained 2 pounds simply reading the recipe! I’m not kidding here. The recipe had way too much sugar.

So I have made few changes to the original recipe, like using fat free condensed milk, reducing the amount of chocolate chips by using miniature chips, reducing the quantity of coconut flakes and adding some dried cranberries. Even then the cookie bars were very sweet. It was more like a caramel candy with nuts and dry fruits. They are so tasty and very addictive too. So bake these when you are having a lot of company only.

I got around 45 pieces and few scraps. I just retained the scraps and sent everything to the party. My husband told me that everybody in his office liked it very much.

My Notes 1 Always remember that miniature chocolate chips can be substituted for the regular ones and only half as much as the regular is required if using the mini chips. For instance, the original recipe mentions to use 2 cups of semi sweet chocolate chips, which is way too much sugar and calories. I substituted it with mere 1/2 cup of miniature chocolate chips.

2 Dried cranberries was also not mentioned in the recipe. I added it to balance the sweetness of the bars.

3 I think lining the pan with aluminum foil and then layering it with the crumbs and other toppings will make the clean up and cutting easier, because you just lift the entire bar with foil and cut it outside. I lined it with wax paper, the clean up was easy and I was able to lift it up, but the paper got stuck to the bars a little bit.

4 During the Christmas season (or Diwali) if you plan to bake goodies and give it to friends and relatives preserve the plastic boxes which you get while buying strawberries, baby spinach, blueberries etc. You can use these boxes to gift your homemade cookies etc. Below I have used a box which came with baby spinach. On the cover there was a big sticker of the product. I was wondering what to do and I got this idea. Anyhow I had to write the ingredients used in the bars because of the food allergies prevalent here, so that people in the office can decide whether they can have it or not. So I cut the plain side of a greeting card which I had received, wrote the ingredients in that card and taped it on top of that sticker.

These cookie bars go to
1. Sharmi’s Cookie Baking Event.
2. Happy Cook’s Homemade Christmas Gifts.
3. JZ’s Santa’s Holiday Challenge.
4. Vandana’s Baking for Beginners.
5. Susan’s Eat Christmas Cookies. Check here for cookies from around the world.

Kamala of Mom’s Recipes  had sent me Cinnamon for the Arusuvai Friendship Chain.  Thank you very much for including me in this chain and for sending me my favorite chocolates too.  When I sent her a mail after receiving the ingredient she replied back that she chose cinnamon because she thought that since I bake a lot I would be using it quite often.  So thoughtful of you Kamala.  Since this is such a special ingredient, I wanted to try something special and interesting.

I was going through a couple of books I have and found this recipe in the Baking for Dummies book, by Emily Nolan.  This was the first book I bought to learn to bake.  It has all the basic information on principles of baking, tools and techniques, a number of recipes, troubleshooting tips and lot more.

This bread is also called pull apart bread because it has to be pulled apart with your hands, instead of cutting it.

Ingredients:

First I will write down the ingredients as it is in the original recipe.  Later I will mention the changes I made.

Part 1:
All Purpose Flour 2 cups
Sugar 1/2 cup
Baking Powder 1 tablespoon
Salt 1/2 teaspoon
Cold Butter 5 tablespoons cut into 5 pieces.

Part 2:
Semisweet chocolate chips 1 cup
Milk 2/3 milk

Part 3:
Sugar 1/4 cup
Ground Cinnamon 1.5 teaspoons
Butter 3 tablespoons melted

Procedure:
1.  Preheat the oven to 350F.  Grease an 8-inch square baking pan.
2.  In a mixing bowl sift and combine all the ingredients mentioned in Part 1 except butter.
3.  Using a pastry blender or a few pulses of a food processor, cut the cold butter into the flour mixture until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

4.  Stir in the Part 2 ingredients and combine to form a dough.

5.  The final dough would look like this.

6.  Divide the dough into 16 balls and place in the prepared baking pan.  The balls will touch.

7.  Drizzle the balls with the melted butter. 

7.  Combine the remaining 1/4 cup sugar and the cinnamon.  Sprinkle them with the cinnamon-sugar mixture.

8.  Bake for 30 minutes, until light brown.  Cool in the pan set on a wire rack before removing from the pan.

My Notes:
1.  For this recipe the butter has to be used straight from the refrigerator. 

2.  If you don’t have a food processor or a pastry blender you can use 2 knives or 2 forks to cut in the fat.  To use a pastry blender, mix the ingredients while cutting into the fats with the blender using a rocking, up and down bouncing motion.

3.  To divide the dough into 16 balls you can follow my method.  First divide the entire dough into 2 equal parts.  Roll the 2 parts into 2 separate logs.  Cut each log into 8 pieces.  While doing this, flour the surface generously.  I also sprayed both my hands with non stick oil spray, so handling the dough was easy.

4.  Similarly for greasing the baking pan, use the butter wrapper.

5.  I pretty much followed the recipe, but for the 6th step.  I melted the 3 tablespoons of butter in the microwave oven and that was really a lot of butter.  My husband was having “are you crazy to pour so much butter and sugar” look in his face.  So instead of using the entire butter and sugar as mentioned in the recipe, I followed his advice of just brushing the dough with little butter,  sprinkled very little sugar, but took another 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon, little cocoa and sprinkled over the balls of dough.

6.  I baked the bread for 32 minutes.  I would advice to cool it in the pan for atleast an hour before taking it out.  I tried to remove the bread after 30 minutes and the bread started to fall apart and crumble.  Anyway I managed to get 10-12 good pieces.  The bread was very moist inside, but a little bit dry on the tops.  I guess it was because I did not use the entire 3 tablespoons of butter as mentioned in the original recipe.  But the taste was phenomenal, with the melted chocolate chips, a hint of sweetness and the aroma of freshly ground cinnamon.

I was searching for zucchini recipes and found this one in Food Network’s site.  It’s by Paula Deen.  The original recipe yields 2 loaves, so I scaled down the ingredients to 50% to bake 1 loaf and used bananas to make it eggless. 

Ingredients:

(PART 1)
All Purpose Flour 1.5 cups
Baking Powder 1/4 tspn
Baking Soda 1/2 tspn
Cinnamon 1/4 tspn ( I used even little because I’m not a big fan of cinnamon)
Salt 1/2 tspn

(PART 2)
Zucchini peeled and grated, 1 cup (I used 1 medium zucchini, the gratings measured nearly 1.5 cups)
Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips 1/2 cup (I used mini chocolate chips)
Pecans 1/2 cup, chopped

(PART 3)
Vegetable Oil 1/2 cup
Granulated Sugar 3/4 cup
Bananas 2 medium size, mashed
Vanilla essence 1 tspn

Procedure:
1. Pre-heat the oven at 350 F.
2. Combine ingredients in Part 1 and sieve them.
3. To this add the ingredients in Part 2.
4. Combine ingredients in Part 3 in a blender/or cream it using an electric hand mixer.  I used my magic bullet blender to blend it.  Add this mixture to the above dry ingredients and mix it well.  You may add a little milk, if you feel that the mixture requires some more liquid.  I had to add a couple of tablespoons of milk because I increased the quantity of zucchini.
5. Pour it in a greased bread loaf pan.

6. Bake it at 350F for 50 min or until a skewer inserted in the middle of the loaf comes out clean.
7. Cool the bread in the pan for 30 minutes before transferring it to a wire rack.  Wait for another 30-45 minutes before slicing the bread.

The bread is very moist and tasty.  Click the images for a bigger view.

My Notes:
1. This is similar to the carrot cake recipe, but uses zucchini and chocolate chips instead.  Next time I will add both carrots and zucchinis.

2. I feel that the Magic Bullet Blender is very versatile.  I bought it 2 years back to puree steamed vegetables and fruits in small quantities for my infant son.  But it does a lot more.  The recipe booklet which comes along with the blender is also very useful.  I have made muffins and soups as mentioned in the recipe book and it has come out very well also.  Even in the above recipe I add all the ingredients in Part 3 in the blender’s big jar and gave it a few pulses and it’s ready within few minutes.  I find it more easy than using an electric hand mixer.

3. Use Vegan chocolate chips/carob chips to make this bread100% vegan.