The Best Easy Cookie Recipes

Rookie cooks are often scared to get beyond opening pouches and mixing milk with cheese powder to make macaroni and cheese. The idea of taking raw ingredients and mixing them together to produce a finished end product scares them more than spiders and snakes. The sad thing is how many people go their entire cooking lives like that. Sometimes, all it takes is making a few easy cookie recipes to get their comfort level up and get them cooking on their own.

For all of these, it's perfectly fine to start off using a boxed mix. That will get you accustomed to the baking process and to the routine of dishing the batter onto the cookie sheets and then pulling the finished products off to cool.

Cookie For Kids

Eventually, though, it's time to leave the prepackaged mix nest and spread your wings to fly into the world of real cookie baking. Here are the four main types of easy cookie recipes:

Peanut butter cookies: For the kid whose favorite lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, this is the king. There's no cookie easier to make, and they deliver on flavor.

Oatmeal cookies: These are the ones made by the kids whose moms wanted them to have cookies, but wanted something at least a little bit healthy. For the fiber-conscious sweet hound, they're great, and they're one of the greatest blank slates for add-ins from raisins to chocolate chips.

Chocolate chip cookies: From the classic Toll House to the vast world beyond, every recipe collection has at least one chocolate chip recipe. They are a universal favorite, and a good step to more complex baking as they are usually the most complex of the easy cookie recipes.

Sugar cookies: The holiday favorite, this will get you some great practice with a rolling pin and with producing cookies in volume and decorating them.

Whichever easy cookie recipe you choose, you're sure to have fun eating the results!

The Best Easy Cookie Recipes

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

NOTE: You are welcome to reprint this article online as long as it remains complete and unaltered (including the about the author info at the end).

Pfeffernusse German Cookies Recipe

This is a traditional recipe for Pfeffernusse cookies which are often made in Germany during the Christmas holiday season. They are spicy, crisp, peppery cookies which are wonderful for dunking in milk or coffee. Their taste even improves with age when kept in a sealed air-tight container at room temperature. Baked cookies can also be stored in the freezer for up to 3 months.

Ingredients:

Cookie Recipes

1/2 cup butter or margarine
3/4 cup dark molasses
1/4 cup honey
2 large eggs
4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup granulated white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon ground white or black pepper
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground anise seeds
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 to 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar for dusting

Directions:

Grease cookie sheets and set aside.

Melt butter or margarine over medium-low heat in a saucepan. Stir in the molasses and honey and continue to heat and stir until mixture is creamy and well blended. Remove the saucepan from heat. Allow to cool to room temperature. Stir eggs into the cooled mixture.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, white sugar, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, ginger, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, anise seeds and salt until well blended. Stir in the molasses mixture and mix well until thoroughly combined. Refrigerate dough for 1 to 2 hours.

Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Roll dough into small balls about 3/4 inch in diameter. Place dough balls 1 inch apart on prepared cookie sheets.

Bake in preheated oven 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Use a spatula to move cookies to a cooling rack.

Place powdered sugar in a plastic bag. Adding a small amount of cookies at a time, shake gently to coat completely with powdered sugar.

Recipe yields about 5 1/2 dozen cookies.

Pfeffernusse German Cookies Recipe

K. Hupp enjoys cooking, gardening and unique collectibles. Visit a German Collectibles Haus to see the newest Steinbach Nutcrackers and Smokers for the holiday season.