One bowl, no mixer
Easy chocolate chip cookies
Melt the butter instead of creaming it. That one change removes the mixer, the second bowl and the waiting, all at once.
35 of the 619 recipes we compared need no mixer and stay in one bowl, and cooks rate them 4.77 against 4.81 for everything else. Taking the shortcut costs you close to nothing. Below: which recipes clear which bar, and the one we would bake.
Read against 619 published chocolate chip cookies recipes and 10,058 reports from cooks who changed one thing.
The part nobody else says
“Easy” is one decision, not five
Melt the butter instead of creaming it and the mixer, the second bowl and the waiting all disappear together.
Creaming is the step that demands equipment: it needs a mixer to beat air into solid butter, it needs its own bowl, and it needs butter you remembered to take out of the fridge. The alternative skips all of that: butter melted on the stove, a liquid oil, or a nut butter already soft enough to stir all go into the bowl liquid or soft, no beating required. Everything filed under “easy” follows from that one choice.
| Of the recipes that… | melt the butter | cream the butter |
|---|---|---|
| need no mixer | 161 | 88 |
| do need a mixer | 105 | 205 |
And it runs the same way through the washing up: 33 of the 74 one-bowl recipes melt their butter. This is a pattern across published recipes, not a controlled test, but it is a very consistent one.
Pick your level
How easy do you actually need it?
Each bar removes a different obstacle, so it is worth knowing which one you care about.
Nothing clears all three. Only 5 of the
619 recipes we compared skip resting
altogether, and none of those is also one-bowl and mixer-free. If you need
the dough in the oven tonight, pick from the no-chill tier and accept a
second bowl. It is the one bar that does not stack with the others.
The pick
The easiest recipe that is still worth baking
Best-evidenced of the recipes that need no mixer and stay in one bowl.
Best-evidenced one-bowl, no-mixer recipe
The Most Wonderful Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever
from bakerbynature.com 4.92 445 cooks rated it
10 minHands on
1 hrWaiting
16Makes
$0.36Each
IntermediateLevel
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup coconut oil, solid but scoop-able109 g
- 1 and 1/4 cups light brown sugar, packed266 g
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract9 g
- 1/4 cup coconut milk (I like to use the thicker Thai variety, but any coconut milk will work)56 g
- 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce61 g
- 2 and 1/3 cups all-purpose flour (be sure not to pack your flour)280 g
- 1 teaspoon baking soda5 g
- 1/2 teaspoon salt3 g
- 2 cups chocolate chips (use vegan chocolate chips if vegan), divided340 g
- Flaky sea salt, optional
Method
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees (F). Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper; set aside.
- In a large bowl whisk together the coconut oil, brown sugar, and vanilla, beating until well combined. Add in the coconut milk and applesauce and whisk until well combined; set aside. In a separate bowl combine the flour, baking soda, and salt; whisk well to combine.
- Add the dry ingredients into the wet mixture and, using a wooden spoon or very sturdy spatula, stir until ingredients are combined. The batter will be very thick! Fold in 1 and 3/4 cups of the chocolate chips.
- Scoop three tablespoon sized mounds of dough onto the prepared cookie sheet, leaving a few inches between each cookies for spreading. Bake for 9 to 10 minutes, or until the edges are golden and the centers have set. Press remaining chocolate chips on top of warm cookies, and sprinkle with sea salt, if using. Cool cookies on the baking sheet for 15 minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack.
Needs:Nordic Ware half sheeta cookie scoopparchment paperAs an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases
The honest bit
What does taking the shortcut cost you?
Take it
158,890 cook ratings
The shortcut costs you nothing cooks noticed
The one-bowl, no-mixer recipes average 4.77 stars. Everything else averages 4.81.
This is the number that matters most and the one nobody publishes. Whatever melting the butter does to the formula, it does not show up in whether people were glad they made them. If easy is what you need tonight, the evidence says take it.
From 35 easy recipes against 584 others, all of them rated by cooks who actually baked them.
The small print
35 recipes
Expect them a touch softer at the edge
Held against the rest of the corpus, the easy recipes read slightly softer at the edge, and slightly is the right word: every gap we measured is small.
These are ordinary wheat-flour, cane-sugar doughs, not a different flour system wearing an easy label, so the comparison is a fair one. A difference this size is the kind you would have to bake both to notice, which is a long way from the trade-off the word “shortcut” implies.
The whole group
All 279 that need no mixer
Sorted by how many cooks have tried them. A few of these still want a bowl for the dry ingredients. The tiers above say which.
Show 24 more
The remaining 243 are on the full list of all 619 recipes.
Straight with you
Where we would be guessing
So you know how far to trust the rest of this page.
No-chill does not stack with the rest
One bowl and no mixer travel together, and 35 recipes clear both. Skipping the rest is a different kind of choice: only 5 of 619 recipes do it, and none of those also clear the other two. That is why this page is tiers rather than one list.
A pattern, not a controlled test
Melted butter and no mixer travel together across published recipes, consistently enough to build a page on. It is still not the same as one person baking the same dough both ways.
Equipment is whatever the recipe says
We read what each recipe tells you it needs. One that quietly assumes a stand mixer without mentioning it would be counted here as needing none, and we have no way to catch that.
Star ratings measure gladness, not texture
The headline finding is that cooks rate the easy recipes as highly as the rest. That means people were pleased they made them. It does not mean the cookies are identical, which is why the outcome comparison sits beside it rather than behind it.