How to Make No-bake Cookies

Cookies are made of butter and love. ~ Norwegian Proverb

How true! Leave alone the sweet taste, the aroma alone - of certain ingredients combined together which are on their way towards becoming a cookie - stirs up a queer sort of warmth from the inner recesses of your being and this mellow warmth engulfs your complete entity in a mist of fondness and good cheer.

At least for as long as that aroma still lingers around your nostrils! While cookies are always a welcome treat, irrespective of whether you offer it to a child or a grown up, the process of making it the traditional way, i.e., baking it, is somewhat cumbersome which takes up quite some time.

It just doesn't make any sense that something which takes so less time to disappear from the jars, plates and trays should take so much time to make! Don't you wish you could just, somehow, conjure up delectable cookies in a matter of minutes without having to go through that routine rut with your oven?

I bet you do! Therefore, I bring you all the information that you could ask for regarding how to make no-bake cookies in a matter of minutes!

Chocolate and peanut butter - does one need to say any more? These two are the universal feel good ingredients that can bring a smile to even the Grinch's lips!

If your suspicion is gaining an upper hand and is making you wonder what the catch is, let me tell you that one look at the no-bake cookies ingredients will make all your doubts disappear with a loud SWOOSH! Hence, stop judging, send your suspicions on a vacation and just bite into the following recipe!

• Unsweetened Cocoa Powder - 8 tablespoonfuls
• Sugar - 4 cups
• Dairy Butter (regular butter) - 2 sticks
• Peanut Butter - 2 cups
• Oatmeal - 6 cups
• Vanilla Essence - 2 tablespoonfuls

• Add the sugar, butter and cocoa powder in a thick bottomed saucepan and bring the mixture to boil on a medium flame.
• As the sugar and butter start melting, stir with a flat spatula to mix these together so that a smooth texture is achieved.

• Boil for about a minute and then add the peanut butter, oatmeal and vanilla essence to the mixture. Stir with the spatula to mix everything evenly.
• Remove the sauce pan from flame.
• Lay out a sheet of waxed paper on a cookie tray or a large, flat plate.

• Drop teaspoonfuls of the hot mixture on the waxed paper, taking care not to drop them too close to each other.
• Keep the tray with the cookie mixture drops in a cool, dry and dark place to allow them to harden. Do not refrigerate though.

If you wish, you can drop cherry, almond and/or walnut bits or raisins on the surface of these drops before they get hardened. This way, you can turn your plain choco-peanut butter cookies into fruits-and-nuts cookies in a jiffy!

Now that you know the basics of how to make no-bake cookies, you can experiment with a lot of other ingredients! Besides the standard ingredients mentioned in the recipe above, you can also add desiccated coconut powder, ground and unsalted rice crackers, full cream milk, ground corn flakes, caramel syrup, etc.

To customize their taste and overall feel and add more crunch to them! Trust me, with these tasty treats around, your kids are gonna have some seriously tough competition from you when it comes to grabbing the cookie jar and dodging away to enjoy the treat in some cozy, secluded corner of the house!