Chocolate Chip Cookies Of DOOM

I shouldn’t Twitter on a sugar high. Last night I gave some choco-chip cookie tips, and did promise to give my recipe. It’s adapted both from my mother’s and from Better Homes & Gardens.

BE WARNED: this makes a LOT of dough. I’ll tell you why in a little bit.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

2c butter
1.5c brown sugar
1.25c granulated sugar
2.25 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. table salt
5 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
5c cake flour
1.25c-1.5c regular flour
1 pkg. of the best choco chips you can afford (I use Ghirardelli’s.)

OPTIONAL: 2.5 c. chopped nuts, or half a package of Heath toffee bits.

How you do this:

First of all, buy the best butter you can afford. A lot of cookie recipes tell you to use butter and shortening, but to me that is an abomination. (Shortening belongs in biscuits, not cookies.) I know it affects the texture of the finished cookie, I just can’t bring myself to think that change is for the best. I bake with butter unless there’s a compelling reason, taste-wise, not to. And for these cookies, there just isn’t.

Melt the butter in a very heavy saucepan over low to medium heat. (I have a Le Creuset saucier that works very well.) While it’s melting, measure out your sugar and brown sugar into a heat-proof bowl. (I use the metal bowl for my KitchenAid mixer.) Whisk the sugars together.

When the butter is fully melted, pour and scrape it into the heat-safe bowl with the sugar. Whisk it together until it looks like, in the Princess’s words, “swampwater.” (It will smell like caramel, and if you heated it to soft-ball stage it would be.) Now put a plate or something over the bowl to keep any critters from trying to sample the deliciousness, and let it sit for a minimum of 15 minutes. (This recipe owes a lot to the NY Times, courtesy of Pim. But this step–melting the butter–I stole from a Cooks Illustrated magazine.) If you’re like me, you’ll wander away, and come back to it twenty minutes later when you realize you were indeed doing something in the kitchen before you got distracted. Or you’ll clean the kitchen, then move into cleaning something else until the timer rings and you wonder what it was for, then you realize you’re making cookies.

Anyway, once the wait is over, measure out your dry ingredients–cake flour, 1c of the regular flour, salt, and baking soda–in a separate bowl. Mix them together thoroughly. The low-protein cake flour is to give the finished cookie a more tender crumb, and you only need to start out with 1c of the regular flour. Use table salt for this step, too, not kosher. (Kosher salt comes later.)

Now put the butter-and-sugar swampwater (it will have a shiny glaze to it) in a mixing bowl, careful to scrape it all out. (I’m a fanatic about scraping.) Use a whisk attachment and whip it, whip it good. Whip the snot out of it. (This step is to incorporate little air bubbles in there.) Turn off mixer, add the eggs and vanilla, whip on low to blend, scrape bowl, then whip on medium for a minute or 90 seconds to get some more of those air bubbles in there. Those air bubbles help, with the baking soda, the cookie be “fluffy.”

When it’s all whipped, switch to a paddle attachment on your mixer and slowly (like a serving-spoonful at a time) add the dry ingredients. (If you don’t have a paddle attachment, don’t fret. Use what you’ve got. The type of mixer with dual beaters just means you have to go slow and scrape the sides a little more frequently.) When they’re all added, shut the mixer off and test the dough. It will be a lot softer than you’re used to, but you can still judge if it needs more flour. Sometimes humidity seems to play merry hob with my cookie dough. Anyway, add up to another half-cup to a cup of regular flour to make it stick together like a cookie dough should. But keep in mind, this dough will be soft.

I know you’re not supposed to, but I often just keep my mixer on low and slowly dump in the chocolate chips. (Plus toffee bits, if I’m feeling frisky. You can add nuts if you like…but not me. Oh, no. Not me.) Then, voila, turn your mixer off. You have ambrosia.

But some people will want to cook their cookies, and not just get sick on the dough.

Here is an important step: cover the mixing bowl with plastic wrap and put the dough in the fridge for at least twenty minutes while you preheat your oven to 375. (Preheating is important. DO EEET.) This will “set” the dough and make it behave when you shape it.

A few things about baking these cookies: they’re meant to be big. I use my bigger spoons to measure out the dough, not my wimpy teaspoons. Line your baking sheet with parchment paper–it’s cheap, it will keep the cookies from burning, and it makes cleanup so easy. And please use baking sheets with no sides. Jelly-roll sheets with the sides do sometimes prevent the cookies from browning right.

I usually do about six to an oven batch on my huge Ikea-bought cookie sheets. (Oh, Ikea. I love you so, so much.) First I measure out the chunks of dough, then (like the OCD baker I am) I use my fingers to shape them just slightly so they are lovely and round and perfect.

Then I sprinkle each cookie with just a little bit of kosher salt. Kosher salt is finer than table salt, and the extra bit of it makes these cookies GOOOOOOOOOOD. Don’t believe me? Try it. I am such a salt fiend, too. I swear I was a deer in a past life, a deer with a yen for salt licks.

Cook in 375 oven for 8-14 minutes. Ovens vary, and the temperature of the dough makes cooking times vary too. I check the cookies at eight and twelve minutes respectively, and I do three or four batches to varying done-ness because some kids here like crispy cookies, others like soft cookies, and still others just want the sugar. Much of cookie baking is practice–you will be able to smell when these are done. Cool on the pan set on a wire rack, for five minutes, then transfer cookies carefully to another wire rack to finish cooling. (Note: cookies are most fragile right when you take them from the oven. They will cook slightly more and firm up in the first five minutes on the cooling pan. Again, practice makes perfect.)

Now, here’s why I make this dough in job lots. To get the best effects from it, you need to cure it, tightly covered, in the fridge for 36 hours or so. It really does make a difference, but if your ravening hordes demand OMG COOKIES NOW you may have to do a few batches so they don’t tear down your battlements. Plus some people (NOT ME, I SWEAR!) may snitch bits of dough.

I line a big Tupperware bin with parchment paper, scrape the dough into it, cover the surface of the dough with plastic wrap, then put the lid on tight. It sits in the fridge for a day and a half, and after that I measure out batches of cookies, put them on a lined baking sheet, and plop the sheet in our big freezer for a little bit. When the shaped balls of dough are half-frozen, I pile them in more Tupperware and keep them in the freezer. I get the whole chunk of dough frozen like that, in shaped cookie bits. So that whenever we want cookies, I just go out, load up a baking sheet with frozen shaped ones, and bake them–370F for about 12-13 minutes. (That extra five degrees cooler just seems to make frozen dough react better. YMMV.)

And that is why I make tons of dough at a time. If my kids ever move out I am going to go on mad quests for more hungry people to feed.

The cookies are best slightly warm, with milk. I prefer the crispy ones myself, until they’re about a day old. Then I like the soft ones.

There’s some survivors in the kitchen calling me right now, as a matter of fact. I have a proof to eyeball today, too. I wonder if I can get that done on a sugar high?

Over and out.

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