Go-To Cookie

When I'm craving something sweet and homemade, I bake one of two things:  brownies or chocolate chip cookies.  What can I say?  I like the basics.  I will eat tiramisu all day long, and if you want to bring me your fancy dessert, I'll eat that too, but my favorites will always be the classics.

In my mother's house, if you ever bake a full batch of cookies, you're doing something wrong.  Lecture all you'd like about raw eggs.  I'll listen politely... as I stuff my face with raw cookie dough.  Mmmm salmonella!  My mother would rather have a spoonful of cold cookie dough than a warm chocolate chip cookie any day, so in her house, we made whatever dough she liked best.  As a result, we always made the standard recipe on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip bag.

Which made flat, hard cookies.

Blech.
Not my picture!

I tried undercooking them.  I tried melted butter, cold butter.  It didn't matter, they were always flat as a pancake and hard as a rock, the two worst things a cookie can be!  I didn't understand that the state of my butter and the heat of my oven couldn't change the fact that there just wasn't enough brown sugar and too much flour for the liquids.  Brown sugar makes your baked goods soft and chewy.  Flour holds them together and makes them stiff.  Mess up the ratio and you have the wrong kind of cookie.

So one day, I took myself to the library and wrote down as many chocolate chip cookie recipes as I could get my hands on.  I ended up with two that I loved, but this one I'm sharing today is my most favorite.  Soft, chewy cookies with a nice, firm browned underside.  They hold together perfectly while remaining chewy and delicious.

Mmmmm

To be perfectly honest, I don't remember where I got the recipe from or what it looked like originally.  Here is my version of...

The Best Damn Chocolate Chip Cookies

3/4 cup butter (room temperature)
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 egg
1 egg yolk**
2 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
Smidge of salt
2 cup chocolate chips (or 1-1/2 cup chocolate chips and 1/2 cup M&Ms for some fun)

  1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
  2. Cream together butter and both sugars.  Make sure your butter isn't too soft or your cookies will spread into chewy soft chocolate lumps.
  3. Add in eggs and vanilla.
  4. Mix flour, baking soda, and salt until completely incorporated but do not overbeat.
  5. Mix chocolate chips (or M&M mixture) until just incorporated.
  6. Drop spoonfuls of cookie dough onto an ungreased baking sheet (you can use parchment paper if you prefer), roughly 2 inches apart.
  7. Bake for 9-12 minutes.  Allow to cool.
**By happy accident, I made the best cookies of my life.  My sister and I were busy discussing how we would spend the $400 million jackpot from the lotto, and I wasn't paying attention.  I added two whole eggs and it turned out PHENOMENAL!  So if you like slightly sturdier, chewier cookies, add two whole eggs instead of one whole egg, one egg yolk.

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