It’s crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Big Guy loves them, and Little Guy proclaims them “the most malicious cookie ever.”

The only down side to this cookie, adapted from Martha Stewart’s Holiday Recipes collection — I dare you to sign up for email newsletters. It’ll suck you in, too — is that it’s small. “Horton Hears a Who” minuscule. Two-bite tiny. And I wound up with far fewer cookies than Martha told me the recipe would make, which makes me wonder how anyone would bother to make a cookie that small.

Maybe it has something to do with baking it egg-free. The original recipe says it will yield 36 cookies. I doubled it and got 45 not much bigger than vanilla wafers. So I keep eating more, convincing myself it’s OK because they’re so small.

The only change I made to the recipe was to substitute one egg’s worth of replacer for one egg yolk. I didn’t use as much water as I usually do with the egg replacer, since an egg yolk is considerably less liquid than the whole egg.

Martha bills this as a Halloween, recipe, and I made it that way, with a candy corn pressed into the top after the cookie comes out of the oven. I was skeptical, but it really worked. No need to limit this great cookie’s potential, though. It stands on its own merits without the candy corn. If you accept the abominations known as Christmas and Easter candy corn, you could try that, but I think I’ll instead dip the top in colored sugar.

A note: Watch your candy corn. Some includes egg, though Brach’s does not, and some could be peanut-contaminated.

• 4 tablespoons margarine, very soft — Martha calls for unsalted butter, but I’m cheap.
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tbl. Bob’s Red Mill egg replacer and two tablespoons warm water. Let cool after mixing. Use 1/2 tbl. replacer if using Ener-G egg
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
• About 36 candy corns

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Martha says to place butter and sugar in a medium bowl; beat with a wooden spoon until combined. Beat in egg yolk, vanilla, baking powder, and salt. Add flour, and mix until a dough forms. My wrists can’t handle the beating, so I used my stand mixer. The dough’s not very thick, so a hand mixer might work.

Scoop out level teaspoons of dough, and roll into balls (chill dough briefly if it becomes too soft to handle). Place balls on baking sheets, 2 inches apart. The original doesn’t say whether to grease the sheet, so I did, preferring to err on the side of unburnt cookies.

Bake until edges are firm and cookies are dry to the touch (do not let cookies color), 10 to 12 minutes. It took 12 minutes for me and I use Air Bake, which lengthens baking times.

Remove from oven; gently press a candy corn into center of each cookie (surface of cookies may crack slightly). Cool on sheets 1 minute; transfer to a rack to cool completely.

There’s also a chocolate variation, though I haven’t tried it: Reduce the flour to 1/2 cup. Add 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder along with the flour.

More egg-free cookies

Copyright 2008 Debra Legg. All rights reserved.

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