I’m not really an authority on chocolate chip cookies. I used to make a lot of them when I was 13, but I fell out of the habit in later years. However, I promised one of my tutorials that I’d bake them cookies, and the majority of students wanted said cookies to be of the chocolate chip variety.
I could hardly bake cookies for some of my students and not all, so I found myself trawling Ze Interwebz for a good chocolate chip cookie recipe that would feed at least 50 kiddlywinks.
How could I go past a recipe that proclaimed to make “The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies EVER!” (emphasis in original)?
I couldn’t. I also couldn’t tell you if these truly are the best cookies, but in making them I learnt a few crucial and life-altering things.
1. If you’re used to working with small amounts of ingredients mixed together by hand, keep in mind the fact that making a huge batch of batter with an electric mixer necessitates a different level of care.
In other words… putting a cup of butter and two cups of sugar into an electric mixer and turning the power level immediately to “high” = KABOOM. Sugar and butter everywhere.
2. If you’ve just spent ten minutes cleaning butter and sugar from the kitchen bench whilst your dog licks butter and sugar off the kitchen floor (note to self: mop kitchen floor), keep in mind that you still have a lot of batter in the bowl and adding the flour necessitates a certain level of care.
In other words… adding two-and-a-half cups of flour to the batter in an electric mixer and turning the power level immediately to “high” = KABOOM. Sugar, butter, and flour everywhere.
I swear, if you’d put me into the oven at this point I would’ve turned into a human cookie. So many sugar crystals, butter flecks and flour snowflakes in my hair.
3. It’s a wonderful feeling when your students love your cookies and proclaim them to have the perfect blend of crispy edges and chewy middles. Hurrah! Success! Who cares if you haven’t yet even chosen a topic for your PhD!
4. Tutorials that start with cookies and storytime* and end with legitimate discussions about female orgasms and Lady GaGa are pretty much the best tutorials ever. So while I can’t say unequivocally that these are the best cookies ever… I am fairly certain that I have some of the best students ever. You guys rock. (Not that many, if any, know or read this blog. If you are reading this and are one of my students, though, come out of the woodwork and say hi!)
The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies For Tutorial Discussions EVER! (see what I did there?)
Adapted from Savory Sweet Life. Makes about 50, even taking into consideration any KABOOMS you might experience. Oh, and my adaptations arose simply out of a lack of ingredients, not deliberate wilfulness.
- 1 cup (250) butter (original recipe said salted, I used unsalted)
- 1/2 cup (110g) caster sugar
- 1 1/2 cups (330g) brown sugar (I ran out of brown sugar, so my mix was more like 270g brown sugar and 170g caster sugar)
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 2 1/2 cups (340g) plain flour
- 1 tsp Murray River Sea Salt – it’s pink! Pink I tell you! (or another small-to-medium coarse sea salt)
- 2 1/4 cups (375g) chocolate chips (I accidentally bought milk chocolate chips, but would normally opt for dark. Still, people loved ‘em! Loved ‘em! Pink I tell you!)
- Preheat oven to 180°C (360°F).
- Cream butter and sugars in an electric mixer at a medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Or, you know, 7, if you have to stop and clean up after the KABOOM.
- Add eggs and vanilla and beat for 2 minutes. Add baking powder, baking soda, salt, and flour, and keep beating until it’s all incorporated. (Again, taking some time to clean up after the second KABOOM.)
- Lastly, mix in chocolate chips. Then spoon about 2 tablespoons of dough onto baking paper-lined baking trays, and bake for 12-14 minutes until the edges are golden.
- Remove tray from oven and leave cookies alone for 2 minutes, then lift the baking paper off the tray (with the cookies on it) and leave them to cool for another few minutes. Eat immediately, or save for your stupendously brilliant students who from now on will always do their readings in preparation for the tutorials. Right?
- Repeat over and over until all the batter is used and you have a bucket-load of cookies on your bench. Ta-daa!
* Yeah, I’m really not kidding. I found an old picture book of mine called “What Do You Say, Dear?” which is subtitled “A Handbook of Etiquette for Young Ladies and Gentleman to be Used as a Guide for Everday Social Behaviour”. I absolutely handed out cookies, perched on my desk, and read the picture book aloud to my 18-year-old students. I highly recommend you find a copy of this book. It’s pure gold.
{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
there was supposed to be an earth-shattering KA-BOOM
More earth-mess-ering…
And I used to just do the vanilla biscuits from the commonsense cookery book, and add stuff.
Now that’s a clever idea!
oh those cookies do look perfect!
They were pretty tasty!
Crispy edges and chewy middles are WHERE IT’S AT! That’s definitely how chocolate chippers are meant to be (and how I always have a hard time making mine, sadface).
I’m thinking that the texture balance gets trickier once you’re playing with flaxmeal and coconut oil instead of eggs and butter! But who needs cookies when you’ve got peanut butter blondies, right?
“What Do You Say, Dear?” was a fixture of my childhood, too. But then, that really shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise by now.
I have memories of making chocolate chip cookies (and hokey pokey cookies…hmmm, I must get that recipe off Mum because it was divine) when I was 13 too. I wish some of my tutorials at uni had involved cookies. Instead they just involved, well, work. Sigh.
PS I will reply to your email but life has been more, um, time-consuming than originally anticipated.
No worries at all, love! I am the queen of delayed replies, so I welcome the same behaviour in others
Oooh, hokey pokey cookies! Yes, you must get that recipe. Honeycomb brilliance, methinks.
Oh, I used this recipe last time I made chocolate chip cookies! Clearly they’re ideal for bribing young’ns… I made them for a sleep-over of assorted pre-teens I was babysitting (it could probably classified as three separate sleep-overs, actually… as the 11 year old girl, 9 year old boy, and 6 year old girl each had their own guests. Am I super-babysitter? Yes. Do I deserve a medal for coming out of that night alive? Yes. And with all the children alive? Oh lord, yes).
In theory, ‘we’ were making the cookies, as a fun and time-consuming after-dinner activity. However, games of chase-your-sister’s-friends-with-a-giant-plastic-fake-spider, and endless re-viewings of Spy Kids meant that I ended up being the sole baker.
Nonetheless, they went down very well, and so many were consumed with ice cream that evening that all the little darlings were quickly sugar-coma-ed and tucked into bed. Thank Christ.
Holy bucket, you are a champion for surviving that! I always loved babysitting but I generally only babysat lovely children, who were of course hard work to keep entertained, but were never terrors-with-spiders. And usually the parents left ice cream and cookies for us on the bench
I’ve also come to understand, in recent years, why my parents rarely ever let me have group sleepovers. *shudder*
Oh those look so good! Now I feel the need to bake choc chips cookies. I often put butter in microwave til it is soft enough to mix by hand if I can’t be bothered getting out the beaters – hand mixing = no kaboom!
And now we know where you got such lovely manners
Yep, that book has taught me how to respond to walking backwards into a crocodile and what to say to a Princess I tied up overnight (seriously. It’s an awesome book).
Yes, that microwave trick sounds like a good idea for the future! I’m used to working with Nuttelex which is always soft enough to not create kabooms.
Perhaps you should do your PhD in kitchen mechanics and chemistry. I would have thought trial and error works, but for you it seems like trial and error squared. I do hope, for the kitchen’s sake, it’s not tripled!
But, I’m glad your students were appreciative – all’s well that ends well, eh?
Hey, as long as it’s your kitchen and not mine, I think we should aim for tian and error octupled!
LOL Well if it makes you feel any better, I still do that thing where I accidentally turn up my mixer on high when it’s full of stuff!
Oh good! My mum was in hysterics laughing at me when she read this (I know because I was on the couch next to her
)
I told my podmates that I was thinking of making chocolate chip cookies and I was immediately met with a demand for “the perfect blend of crispy edges and chewy middles”, pretty much. It seems to be a widespread pair of criteria. The cookies I made were the ones in my antioxidant garbage post, and people seemed to be pretty happy with the nature of the edges and middles of the finished products. I was more than content just to eat the raw dough. Oh yeah.
I sometimes wish I had the time to bake cookies/banana bread/peanut butter bars every morning, so that I could eat the raw dough for breakfast daily. Let the rest of the world have their crispy edges… you and I know where the true [taste-]beauty lies.
Another of your recipes to save, print out and try with Sapphire. Kaboom! is likely to happen in our kitchen too, with our dog just as grateful for it
See, it’s just ’cause we’re super kind pet-owners, right? Not that we’re silly in the kitchen. Right? Right?
(And this recipe is definitely child-friendly/Sapphire-friendly, I’d posit. Everyone-friendly, actually. Chocolate chip cookies are like that
)
I was so disappointed by the lack (to date) of your students coming out of the woodwork that I briefly toyed with the idea of pretending to be one but this kind of behaviour never ends well in the movies so here I am, boring old Conor (or is it? perhaps it’s one of your students pretending to be me! Er,,, her!)
I’m glad you’re grasping the importance of baking in your PhD journey. The rest is just filler.
So, so true. I may or may not have only come into uni at noon because I woke up and decided to bake muffins first.
And I’m not surprised no students have come out of the woodwork. Only two know about it, and I doubt they could remember the url off the top of their head. Heads. Because clearly, they each have their own head. Yes.
oh my – I should not have read this post before breakfast! Yummo!
That’s one of the risks of food-blog-reading, isn’t it? Cookie cravings at all times of the day…
I swear our home mixers are twins…., they both do the same thing
….it happens if you’ve got an anna in your name, perfectly normal!
*laughs* Love it!!
I wonder how one would become an authority on chocolate chip cookies. Do you think there’s a course you can take? A degree in chocolate chip cookieology?
If there is, I’m totally prepared to become a Doctor of it! Actually, anything to get me away from the panic-stricken-frozenness of my PhD!