Favorite Recipe Friday: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Let me just begin by saying that I made cookies waaaaay too many times this winter. But given the two (or was it three?) sets of snow days we had, I don't really feel it was my fault. I'm stuck in the house, I shouldn't go anywhere, what am I gonna do? Bake, of course. And eat.

I love love love classic chocolate chip cookies, and I've never bothered to find a recipe other than the one from the back of the Nestle bag. And when I discovered that even when I threw away the bag, I still had access to the recipe on the Nestle website, Very Best Baking, I was thrilled.

So, without further ado, my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies


Original recipe from Very Best Baking

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 12 oz. package milk chocolate chips
3/4 to 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

The only change I make to the original recipe is to only use half a package of chocolate chips. Because I'm cheap. And I like a rather large ratio of cookie to chocolate chip. When all you can taste is the chocolate, you lose the wonderful cookie flavor, and that makes me sad.

Start off by beating together the butter and both kinds of sugar. You want to beat it until the whole mixture becomes light and fluffy. I had a wonderful picture of this; unfortunately, my computer hated it, so it's gone now. Just take my word for it. It was beautiful.

Next, add the vanilla and eggs.

The eggs should be room temperature; the easiest way to get them there quickly and safely is to fill a bowl with warm water and submerge the eggs in it for no longer than two minutes.

After you add the room temperature eggs, and the vanilla, beat it all together. Resist the urge to taste the dough because of the possibility of salmonella (unless, of course, you're not pregnant and don't have a paranoid husband. In that case, go right ahead)

Then add the flour, baking soda, and salt.

Mix it all together and add the chocolate chips and nuts.

Mix it for the last time.

Drop the dough onto a greased cookie sheet. If you want more cookies but smaller ones, only do about a tablespoonful of dough. For larger cookies, use larger globs of dough

Bake at 375 degrees (Fahrenheit, obviously) for 9 to 11 minutes. If the edges are golden brown, that's usually a good time to pull them out, unless you're one of those weirdos who prefers their cookies crunchy and half-charred. Let the cookies cool on a cooling rack, and try to avoid eating them all at once

In case anyone was wondering, the mixer in the pictures is a Bosch classic mixer. My mom got a new one, so she gave me her old one to see if I could get it functional. There's nothing wrong with the mixer itself, but after Mom using it for 20 years or so, the little plastic pieces that keep the bowl in place while the beaters spin have worn completely off. Like so.

And here you can see the grooves on the bottom of the bowl that are supposed to slot into place on the base.

We tried replacing the plastic pieces with JB Weld; it held long enough to make this one batch of cookies, but that was about it. Now we need to see if we have any welders in our friends or family who can run a bead that will work. Or I need to find $400 to buy a new one. To any of my family members reading this, the answer to "what do you want for your birthday" is "money to save up for a Bosch. I hate to retire the old one when the motor on this one is just fine, but I'm not sure if there are any other options. 

Pie Crust with Butter (aka Reason #572 why I love my food processor)

It's been awhile! I have a longer draft post waiting for some time when my daughter isn't attacking my keyboard. But I'm super excited about how easy this crust was to make, so I wanted to share.

I wanted apple pie. My brother has been taunting me with pie on Facebook (okay, so he wasn't actually taunting me, but posting pictures of your pie on Facebook when your sister is in the third trimester is basically the equivalent of taunting). I NEEDED apple pie. But my standard pie crust recipe uses shortening, which is basically partially hydrogenated oil in solid form. I'm trying to avoid the partially hydrogenated stuff. So, in my handy-dandy Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook I found a recipe for a tart crust that is basically pie crust, but with butter instead of shortening. I modified the recipe a bit from the original, but it still worked rather well

Pie Crust with Butter

1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. (1 stick) cold butter
1 egg
1 T. cold water

Here's the exciting part; I made this pie crust in the food processor. I had seen on other sites how you could use the food processor to cut the butter into the flour mixture, and I wanted to try it, given how time-consuming it is to use a pastry blender to cut in butter or shortening. I don't have any pictures of this part, because I was afraid it wasn't going to work, but it was AMAZING.

Combine flour and sugar in food processor with the chopping blade and process for about 30 seconds to mix. Add cold butter (yes, put it in straight from the fridge; thermodynamics says so) and process for about another 30 seconds. Check to make sure you don't have any huge chunks of butter left; if it's working right, it will look like the butter disappeared into thin air. In a separate bowl, beat the egg and add the cold water. Add the egg mixture to the food processor and process for about 1 to 2 minutes, until the dough comes together. It won't form a ball, but you should have several larger lumps of dough.

I ignored the original recipe instructions to refrigerate the dough for 30 to 60 minutes to make it easier to handle, which is why my pie crust looks slightly zombiefied in the pictures. It doesn't affect the taste at all, but the dough did have a tendency to come apart as I transferred it to the pan. I would highly recommend chilling the dough, and using extra flour to reduce the stickiness.

Conclusion

I was a little afraid to try this, having only had crust made with shortening in my entire life. But it was delicious, and didn't taste noticeably different from the crust I was used to. I will need to experiment with if it's possible to get pretty crust from this recipe, but for me, taste is a much, much higher priority than looks.

You gotta have ice cream with your pie!

New By Me: Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Muffins

I have a camera again!!! After a couple of weeks of cameraless existence, thanks to an investigative toddler, I have a shiny new camera, so now I have no excuse not to blog. Especially since we're snowed in. Are you snowed in? Apparently a lot of the country is, especially those of us in the south.

Being snowed in always makes me want to bake. I don't know if it's a primitive need to ensure there is food for my family, or if pregnancy is making me nest a few months early, or if I just like baking and snow days actually give me a chance to do so. Probably some combination thereof. Anyway, I woke up this morning, and I wanted something warm and baked for breakfast. I opened up my handy-dandy Better Homes & Gardens cookbook (my go-to cookbook for basic recipes), checked their muffin recipe, assessed the contents of my kitchen, and decided to modify the recipe. I ended up with Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Muffins.

I honestly don't know what came over me. I usually prefer to try a recipe before changing it around. But it worked, so I shouldn't complain.

Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Muffins

1 1/3 c. all-purpose flour
3/4 c. oats (I used quick, old-fashioned would probably also work.)
1/3 c. packed brown sugar
2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1 T. ground cinnamon
1 beaten egg
3/4 c. milk
1/4 c. oil
1 1/2 t. vanilla
3/4 c. chopped apples

In a medium bowl, mix together flour, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon together and make a well. 

Mix egg, milk, oil, and vanilla together in a separate bowl. 

Add egg mixture to dry ingredients and mix just until there are no more dry spots. Mix apples in gently.

Put in 12-cup muffin pan (the cups will fill about 3/4 of the way) and bake at 400 for 18 minutes or until they look done (the original recipe said "golden" but the batter is kinda brown, so that doesn't work :)

   

Conclusion: At first I wasn't sure how I felt about these, because they're not as sweet as muffins you get from the store. But the more I ate them, the more I felt like this wasn't a bad thing. They're not super-sweet, but the sweetness is there, and the flavor is lovely. If you want your muffins sweeter, you might try upping the sugar to 1/2 cup. However, the recipe as-is met with the whole-hearted approval of my picky toddler. She ate one warm from the oven with butter and has snacked on the cold ones all afternoon.