Can it be done?
I would like a very simple cookie recipe I can make with my kids (3 & 4) and that doesn’t need a mixer (that I don’t have). Is there such a thing?
Thanks in advance.
IMHO, the hardest part about making cookies without a mixer is blending butter/margarine with other ingredients. Your hands and arms will be aching before the mixture is fluffy. Look for recipes using vegetable oil instead of butter. Or buy a cheap portable mixer.
ETA: That wasn’t helpful at all! Let me look for some recipes. I know I’ve made oatmeal cookies with vegetable oil before.
Or maybe you could start with muffins – most muffins use oil instead of butter.
I’ve never owned a mixer, and I manage to bake cookies and breads quite well, I think! Don’t worry about it, I say, just make sure you blend well by hand.
I have my eye on a KitchenAid, but I just cannot buy anything else for the kitchen until we build the new house and I have a decent sized kitchen. It is too much of a squeeze right now.
How important is fluffiness?
Pyper, any recipes or site for recipes that you can recommend?
You are talking about cookies and kids. You don’t have to make a big production out of it.
I don’t know if the fluffiness is important on its own, or if fluffiness is the signal that your ingredients are fully blended.
Here’s a recipe for peanut butter cookies using vegetable oil.
I make them without a mixer all the time. I let the butter get fairly soft before I start. For some recipes, like the classic Tollhouse cookie (the one on the Nestle chocolate chip package) I much prefer them hand-mixed because the mixer tends to overwork the butter.
Slice & Bake. The condensed joy of baking without the mess in the kitchen.
I was halfway done with making some cookies a couple months ago when I realized I didn’t have a mixer. I mixed the dough with my hands. Easy peasy. I softened the butter in the microwave. I washed my hands before I did it, and then I, you know, baked the cookies, which I’m pretty sure killed off any more potential germs.
I think letting kids mix dough by hand would actually be pretty fun for them. Potentially messy, but fun.
My point precisely. I just want the simplest, easiest recipe out there. If they sold it here, I would go the Oakminster way. Alas, no such luck for my location.
ETA: And yes, messy IS fun. Getting the kids all messy is exactly what I want. They get all frustrated when I make meatballs (their favorite meal) and I don’t let them get their hands into the raw meat.
I don’t think “fluffy” is required - I made cookies throughout my whole childhood, with my mother and sister, and we used a wooden spoon in a bowl to cream together the butter/margarine and sugar. Just pay special attention to this step and see if you like the results.
Came in to say this. You can make cookies with a mixer? There are some recipes with sufficiently sturdy dough that we broke out the food processor, but it was mostly a by-hand operation for us.
Especially if the recipe requires an egg. Let the butter get to room temperature, moosh it about with the sugar, put the egg in (or, if using more than 1 egg, put in 1 at a time) and then beat the heck out of it with a wooden spoon.
My Mum made cookies and cakes and bread dough for 6 kids for decades without an electric mixer.
Any of your basic drop cookies should be fine to make by hand, and even most of your rolled/shaped cookies. People made cookies and butter-based cakes for a long, long time before electric mixers came on the scene, after all. I’ve run across a few cookies that were a right pain in arse to make by hand, but the recipes have always mentioned that the dough gets really stiff.
As others have said, just make sure you let your butter get pretty darn soft if you’re using real butter. If you’re using a margarine or butter-flavor Crisco, those are already fairly spreadable and it’s less of a big deal.
I think with kids, I’d probably go with a basic chocolate chip cookie to start with.
Fluffy incorporates more air, making the cookies puffier, but I’ve found that chocolate chip cookies taste just as good as those made with properly creamed butter and sugar if you accidentally melt half the butter while you’re thawing it and have the rest totally gooey.
In my case, that’s two sticks of butter, all gooey and melty. Then you mix in your 3/4 C white sugar and 3/4 C brown sugar (if you like a molasses flavor, make it 1/2 C to 1 C; if you don’t like molasses, reverse that, but you need some brown sugar!), beat it until it’s well mixed, add an egg, stir it well, add another egg and a teaspoon of vanilla, stir that well, then stir in a mix of 2.5 cups of flour (most recipes call for 2.25 cups, but I like my way better), 1 teaspoon of baking soda, and 1 teaspoon of salt. Stir that if you can or use your hands, then add the bag of chocolate chips and anything else that you want. The dough is good with any mix-in: they need not be chocolate chips.
Momma made us kids do the mixing. Great for upper arm and shoulder development. 
To be serious though, that’s pretty much what we did, leave the butter and such out until it was room temperature which made mixing it up easier.
We also made no-bake peanut butter cookies which had oatmeal, although I’ll be darned if I can remember exactly how.
Same here! I’ve been baking cookies for over 20 years and have never used a mixer.
An even simpler peanut butter cookie recipe -
1 cup caster sugar (ordinary will do, just mix it longer in the-)
1 egg
1 cup peanut better.
It works fine. Mix with a spoon until you can’t see individual sugar granules then spoon out and cook in a moderately hot oven for about 10 mins.
Cookies have been around a heck of a lot longer than mixers. **Lizardling **is right, my great granny could beat up a navvy after a lifetime of hand mixing.
I’ve never used a mixer for cookies. It’s too much trouble to use a mixer for something as simple as cookies. Just soften the butter and lightly whip the eggs with a whisk or fork before you add to mixture.
Just came in to say that. My mom taught me how to bake when I was about 6 years old and I don’t think that I ever used a mixer. You can soften the butter by heating it but IME it’s really easy to overdo it and wind up with melted butter - you can still make cookies but they’re pretty flat.
Better way is to just take the butter out a few hours early, set it on a dish somewhere and let it soften.