Chocolate Chip Cookies v1

Almost nothing, I think, smells as good as cookies baking in the oven. The smell just wafts through the house, drifting here and there, always catching the attention of...well, of your nose :P I had been wanting to bake cookies for awhile for some reason, so today, I decided to relax a bit on the revision, and bake some cookies! :D Great exam de-stresser, hehe.

Last year, I fell in love with Sainsbury's Taste The Difference Bakery cookies. They were SOOOOOOOOOO good. Slightly chewy, VERY chocolatey (get the triple chocolate one, *drool*) and oh so yummy! So when I got back Brunei, I searched around for a chewy cookie recipe. The one I got wasn't the same, doesn't even compare :P But its more than good enough to satisfy any cookie cravings you might have :D So here you go!

What you need:
1 cup softened butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar (I cut down on the sugar some more, they were still plenty sweet)
2 eggs
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 12-ounce bags of semi-sweet chocolate chips

What you do:

1. Preheat the oven to 175 C
2. In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter, sugars, eggs and vanilla.
3. In another bowl, mix together the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda.
4. Combine the wet and dry ingredients.
5. Stir in the chocolate chips.
6. Place golf-ball sized dough portions 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet.
7. Bake for 10-12 minutes or just until the edges are light brown.

We had to cream the butter and sugar with a (manual) balloon whisk. Miss the electric mixer back in Brunei, hahaha. Though last year, Hadi and Justin once managed to cream egg white and sugar until it was stiff ... with FORK! o.0 Seriously....that is very impressive. Its hard enough with a whisk, but a freaking fork?! We all had to take turns, since our arms were BURNING! I had to help as well -_-; If they had told me, I could've brought my whisk, but noooo....

Anyway, back to the cookies....almost as soon as they were out of the oven, Hadi and Justin were grabbing some and wolfing them down :P They smelled good, they tasted reaaaallly nice as well!

One note, since the chocolate chips here in the UK are stupidly expensive, I decided to use baking chocolate instead, and just mash it up into small pieces (with a rolling pin. yes, I have one.). Best decision I ever made :D The chocolate chunks tasted soooooo much better than chips. And when the cookies were fresh out of the oven, they were warm and melty and tasted sooooo good. For some weird reason, the chocolate stayed quite melted, even after the cookies were cool. Not that we care :P It makes it taste so much better! I fully recommend!

Also, apart from the Sainsbury's cookies, I generally like my cookies a bit crunchy. So I baked the cookies until they were more than slightly brown. Seriously yummy... *drool* It was really really sweet though, with the added chocolate, so if I ever make this again, I'll cut down the sugar some more :P

Can you gain weight just by breathing in the amazing smell of baking chocolate chip cookies? o.0