Description:
These cookies when they first come out of the oven are soft and cakey, with a satisfying crunch on the first bite. They have a satisfying chocolatey flavor that isn't overpowering, and they melt beautifully in your mouth.
These cookies when they first come out of the oven are soft and cakey, with a satisfying crunch on the first bite. They have a satisfying chocolatey flavor that isn't overpowering, and they melt beautifully in your mouth.
First, grab a large bowl and sift inside your Flour, Baking Powder, Granulated or Cane Sugar, and Salt. This will make your flour less clumpy, and will help mix your dry ingredients together. You should also mix it a bit more after sifting, but this isn’t fully necessary.
Put your Butter and Brown Sugar inside of a small or medium pot, and melt together on medium-high heat. This is called browning your butter. Technically, you don’t need to melt it with the brown sugar, but it does make everything a bit nicer to work with. The longer you do this for, the nuttier your cookies will taste, so keep that in mind when baking. Make sure to consistently mix the mixture while doing this.
Once your sugar-butter mixture is at the brownness you want it to be, pour in your Vanilla Extract, while mixing, and then slowly mix into your dry ingredients. You may start with a whisk, but you will fairly quickly want to swap to using a spoon or spatula.
Add your Eggs into the dough, and continue to mix until well incorporated.
Chop your Chocolate Bars into chunks (of whatever size you may wish). Let your dough sit during this time. You are chopping your chocolate now so that you can let the dough cool a bit before mixing your chocolate in.
Once your chocolate is all chopped, mix as much as you feel is necessary into the bowl, as well as any extra mix-ins you may like. Make sure to well incorporate the chopped chocolate and other mix-ins into the dough.
Cool the dough for roughly 30 minutes to an hour in the refrigerator. This is to let the dough harden.
Preheat your oven to 350º Fahrenheit (Approx. 177º Celsius). This way, your oven will be ready to bake by the time you’re done forming your dough balls!
Roll your dough into small balls of roughly 0.5-1.5 inches, and space them out on a well oiled tray roughly 2 inches apart, so that they have room to spread apart. Bake for roughly 10-15 minutes, until golden brown, or until a toothpick when pressed into the largest cookie comes out clean.
Use a spatula to move cookies onto a cooling rack or plate. Let cookies cool well before serving. They will come out soft, but will harden up.
So I made this recipe when I was around 16 or 17, after having been a home baker for around 3-4 years. At this time, I was always borrowing recipes, or using box mix, or cookie tubs. But I decided my favorite part of baking is measuring things out and mixing it together, so I decided I wanted to start making recipes.
Upon making this decision, I started googling how to make a cookie recipe, and I followed a guide on making my own. So I did. Then I went to this ratio sheet I keep saved on my phone, and used it for help as well. I wrote down the first potential recipe on my phone, and I decided to make it. And low and behold, it turned out great!
I have now made it around 2-3 times, and each time I get feedback on it, trying to make the recipe a bit better, so this recipe will likely change in the future. But right now, I’m happy with how it is.
Why did I decide to make chocolate chip cookies, however? Well, a few reasons. I don’t really like chocolate, but chocolate chip cookies have been my favorite cookies for all of my life. They are basic and expected, so I figured I needed to make my own recipe for one. I figured if I want a bunch of recipes to pass down to my children, this should be the one recipe I absolutely must have. More than challah (my recipe isn’t even my own, so we need to fix that problem), more than cake, more than anything else. So I made it, and now I have it.
Along with this, cakes and breads are honestly quite simple. But there’s a complexity to cookies, even the simple ones, that can be hard to get right, and for the first recipe I make, that sounded like a perfect challenge.
Anyways, that’s sort of the backstory on this recipe, and I’m not sure there’s much else to tell about these cookies, so get to baking if you haven’t already!