Bailey Tries... cornstarch Cookies

You know I like to try weird recipes so when I saw this one for cookies that replace flour with cornstarch, I knew I had to try them! The big selling point for me was that they had a melty texture which sounded divine. Apparently, these cookies are popular in Mexico and Brazil but you can find a million versions online so I just picked one that sounded simple. Don’t you just love when a recipe is easy and requires little grocery shopping?

The ingredients are few and the method is straightforward. Combine 8 tablespoons of butter with a can of sweetened condensed milk and ¼ teaspoons of salt. I chose to add a capful of vanilla extract at this point because other recipes added it and that sounded yummy. Then you slowly add in 2 ¼ cups of cornstarch. The recipe said you might not need it all but I did. Mix until you get a smooth dough which doesn’t take long. Then just treat them like thumbprint cookies. Roll into a ball and squash with your thumb or a fork. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. They won’t get golden except on the bottoms so don’t over cook them.

So, how was the flavor? DELICIOUS!!!! How could it not be with sweetened condensed milk? Actually, I like that they weren’t that sweet… more like a tea cake, you know? The texture was very melty BUT it was also super crumbly. Like make them small and stick the whole thing in your mouth crumbly. Which led me to ask myself what would happen if you did the same thing with just flour? Would the raw flour flavor be an overkill? Bet yet, could you go halfsies and do half flour and half cornstarch? So that’s exactly what I did and here are my results…

They all tasted pretty much the same so the raw flour wasn’t a concern but I did use cake flour to help the consistency so maybe that made the flour less “raw”. Texture wise they were SO different. The two experimental batches came out more like a batter than the smooth dough of the full cornstarch option which made an extremely messy situation for cookies.

The all flour option came out dense… like a cosmetic sponge dense. They also darkened up a bit more than the other two options and were the least attractive because of the goopy batter. The halfsies option looked smoother than I expected because the batter was pretty goopy, as well, but they behaved a little better in the cooking process.

So, what are my overall impressions? I think your best option is to make the original cookies and just make them tiny and one bite worthy. The texture was the best, if messy, and definitely the easiest to make and clean up. Try them out and let me know what you think!