Cookie Craze

It seems like there is a cookie craze going on at the minute. Nearly every other post I see on Instagram is to do with cookies…maybe it’s just my feed. I thought that I might as well jump on the cookie bandwagon myself.

A perfect cookie in my opinion is crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle. In terms of ratio of chocolate chips to dough – I prefer more dough (I’m weird I know)! It’s always important to start with a base recipe so I decided to use one from Tasty. The recipe was really straight forward and was even called the best chewy chocolate chip cookies. While they are tasty (haha get it?), I feel like the recipe could do with a few more tweaks. Being at uni, studying food, has helped me understand how the use of different ingredients can effect the final product. I’m going to list the ingredients I used below.  Ingredients:

½ cup sugar ¾ cup light brown sugar  1tsp salt ½ cup butter (melted)  1 egg 1tsp vanilla 1 ¼ cup plain flour ½ tsp baking powder (I made a mistake - its supposed to be 1/2 tsp baking soda...I wasn't paying attention and put baking powder in instead!) 8 ounces chocolate  I had to make some changes to the ingredients as there were some things I didn’t have at home. The recipe called for brown sugar but all I had was light brown sugar. While the cookie turned out okay I think using the brown sugar would provide a richness of flavour that the light brown sugar does not.This is because brown sugar has a higher percentage of molasses than light brown sugar.  Even though my cookies were chewy I think they would have been more so if I had used the darker sugar.

Also the recipe called for ½ tsp baking soda…I used baking powder. This was a mistake but it just proves that using the wrong raising agent was not detrimental for the cookies. One time I was making banana bread and forgot to put the raising agent in...not good. However, my flatmates seemed to gobble it up anyway!

Baking soda is about 2x stronger than baking powder so if I had used 1 tsp of baking powder I would have had the correct amount of raising agent. Perhaps this would have aerated them more in the oven and provided a greater lift.

The type of chocolate you use is so important for the taste of the cookies. I used cooking chocolate – not the best kind, but this was all I had at hand. The chocolate is quite bitter which does balance out the sweetness from the cookie but it makes it very rich. The original recipe used a mixture of both milk and dark chocolate but as I prefer milk chocolate next time I may just use that. I do think 8 ounce of chocolate is a lot for just 12 cookies – I think I may experiment with 6 next time. Or perhaps leaving the chocolate out of the dough and then when forming the cookies strategically placing the chocolate. This would mean that the ratio of chocolate to dough would be more or less even in all the cookies. As I said before this is a good base recipe but I think I would like a few more tries at it before I declare my cookies as the best chewy chocolate chip cookies.

Method

1.      Cream together butter, sugars and salt 2.      Add in the egg and vanilla extract  3.      Sieve in the flour and baking soda/powder 4.      Mix through the chocolate chunks and leave to cool in the fridge for 30 mins 5.      Once the dough has chilled form 12 balls by using an ice cream scoop  6.      Bake in a 180c oven for 12-15 mins  7.      Let cookies cool before eating (or if you can't wait take caution to not burn your tongue!)