There’s rarely a reason not to bake chocolate chip cookies. If you don’t have an old standby – or if you just want to try out a new recipe – this one has proven so popular, I get requests for these cookies when I travel to see friends.
This recipe is from a wonderful blog called Smitten Kitchen. Once these cookies cool, they’re a little crispy and a little chewy. They also freeze well, but that’s assuming the family doesn’t eat the whole batch they day they’re made.
Chocolate chips are disproportionately expensive here. Instead of using them, I’ll buy a few bars of Dove chocolate – two bars of milk chocolate and three bars of dark chocolate – put them in the fridge for a few minutes, then chop them up into small pieces. Just use the heaviest knife you have, watch your fingers, and don’t worry about cutting them to uniform size; it’ll all taste the same when it’s melted together.
Also, this recipe (like most other dessert recipes) calls for unsalted butter. I found that salted butter is even more delicious; there’s so much sugar in the recipe, you won’t run the risk of salty cookies. However, if you don’t like baked goods with any salt in them, stay with unsalted butter.
Here’s what you’ll need:
2 cups all-purpose flour (jiaozi flour works just fine)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup (un)salted butter, melted*
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips (or 2 cups’ worth of chopped milk and dark chocolate)
Heat the oven to 165 degrees Celsius. Grease your baking sheet with butter or line it with parchment paper.
Mix together flour, baking soda, and salt. You can either sift them together with a sifter, or dump them in a mixing bowl and stir them around with a fork. Set aside.
In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar, and white sugar until well blended.
Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until light and creamy. Mix in the dry ingredients until just blended.
Using a wooden spoon or a plastic spatula, stir in the chocolate chips/pieces. Drop balls of dough (a quarter cup of dough will yield very large cookies. For normal-sized cookies, I usually round out a large tablespoon of dough) onto the prepared sheet, leaving about 3 inches (7.6 cm) between each cookie.
Baking time depends on your oven and the size of the cookies. Mine generally take 12 to 15 minutes to cook through. Keep an eye on them; they’ll be done when the edges are lightly toasted.
Cool the cookies on the baking sheets for a few minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack to cool them completely. (If, like me, you don’t have a cooling rack, that’s fine. I’ll usually just lift the whole sheet of parchment paper, with cookies still on it, and set it on the table to cool. Sure, you don’t get the airflow that you would with a rack, but the cookies have never suffered for lack of sufficient rack-cooling.)
*3/4 of a cup of butter is about 170 grams of butter. Because a stick of butter here is more grams than it is in the US where I’m from, I generally eyeball it and get as close to 170 grams as possible.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons author Andrew Magill
