Cookies Made with Hard-Boiled Egg Whites - It Works and It's Fantastic!

I love a chocolate chip cookie that lives in the sweet spot between hard and crispy and soft and chewy - a cookie that is good with a glass of milk (but doesn't require one) and that gently crumbles in my mouth, but doesn't fall apart in my hand if I hug it too hard.  These chocolate chip cookies fit the bill.  Their flavor - sweet and salty with just the right amount of chips - hits the mark as well.

The taste and texture aren't the only things that set these chocolate chip cookies apart from the crowd; it's their surprising ingredient - hard-boiled egg whites - that makes them so unique!  The egg whites dissolve during baking so your unsuspecting eaters will never know they were there.  I can't profess to understand all of the science behind why the hard-boiled egg whites give these cookies such a stellar texture, but I can say that surprisingly, using them works. 


Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

I had a handful of hard-boiled egg whites left over after making my deviled egg frosting and I didn't want them to go to waste. A Google search led me to a recipe on my favorite cookie blog, Cookie Madness, for chocolate chip cookies made with hard-boiled eggs.  Perfect!  I took Anna's recipe and adapted it to work with just the whites of the hard-boiled eggs.  If you have a whole hard-boiled egg on hand and don't want to make deviled egg frosting, then you may want to try her chocolate chip cookie recipe as written. 
Here is my chocolate chip cookie recipe adapted from Cookie Madness.
 
Yield: 30 small cookies

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, cold
• 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• whites from 1 1/2 hard-boiled eggs, broken into small pieces
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons whole milk
• 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
2. Using an electric mixer, beat butter on high speed until you have a bowl full of little butter crumbles.
3. Mix in flour until completely combined with the butter.  You'll now have slightly larger crumbles.
4. Mix in the salt and baking soda.
5. Mix in the sugar, brown sugar, and hard-boiled egg whites.  Don't expect to see the egg whites disappear.  You'll be able to see them until the cookies bake.
6. Mix in the vanilla extract and milk.
7. Fold in the chocolate chips.
8. Roll dough into small balls (or big ones if you like bigger cookies) and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment or a Silpat.
9. Bake for 20 minutes or until the bottoms are slightly browned.

Cupcakes with Hard-Boiled Egg Whites

Of course, I had to wonder whether cupcake recipes made with hard-boiled egg whites would also turn out well.  I took my Ultimate Vanilla Cupcake recipe and replaced the two eggs with two and a half hard-boiled egg whites and added them with the dry ingredients.  The texture of the cupcake wasn't quite as good as the original, but it worked!  People still loved the cupcakes and no one suspected the hard-boiled egg.  If I had left over hard-boiled eggs, I wouldn't hesitate to use them in cupcakes.