Chocolate Chip Cookies v2

I just realised that its really really hard to take a decent picture during the winter. :( During the summer last year, all my pictures were nice and bright and sunny and made the food look so appealing! Now, I have to make to with switching on every light in the kitchen :( Except for a few select dishes, most of the pictures, sad to say, are not so hot. The Penne With Chicken and Cheese, and the Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic, however, look good! I am not ashamed to admit it, hehe :D Those are truly photogenic dishes! ;)

Anyway...

My adventure with cookies first came close to 5 years ago. The recipe I obtained from the back of a Hershey's baking product. The result was a whole load of cakey chocolate chip cookies - not so much on the crunchy, more to a very very very firm cake. Everyone else loved it. I absolutely hated it. No one could understand why. But the cookies were really nothing what I expected.

While I've fallen in love with Sainsbury's Taste The Difference Cookies, my heart really yearns for really crispy cookies. Something like Famous Amos'. *drool* Although I liked my chewy cookies from last time well enough, I've actually been hunting high and low for a chocolate chip cookie recipe that gives you thin and crisp cookies (without the need to burn them :P) Then I came across this recipe...

What you need:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teapsoon salt
1 cup salted butter
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon water
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 large eggs
1 cups semisweet chocolate chips (I substituted this with small pieces of baking chocolate)

What you do:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C. Prepare two cookies sheets, by greasing them or lining them with baking paper.
2. In a large bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and salt.
3. In another large bowl, cream the butter and sugars. Add the water and vanilla. Mix the ingredients until they are just combined.
4. Add the eggs and mix them lightly. Stir in the flour mixture. Fold in the chocolate chips. Don't overmix the dough.
5. Drop the cookies 2 inches apart onto the prepared cookies sheets using two tablespoons or an ice cream scoop.
6. Bake them for 12 minutes or until the edges and centers are brown. Remove the cookies to a wire rack to cool.

For this, I finally broke out my shiny new mixer :D Its nothing special, and I much prefer the one back at home in Brunei, but it sure beats mixing the dough by hand with a balloon whisk, believe me. :D Apparently, if you want a nice crisp cookie, you shouldn't use the mixer at high speeds, so I kept it to the lowest setting. Otherwise, the cookie would be all cakey. Which makes sense, really, since more air would be incorporated into the dough at higher speeds. I only used the mixer to cream the butter and sugars, and used a wooden spoon to mix all the rest. :P

So how were the cookies? True to what it claims, the recipe does give thin very crisp cookies. I had some problems with the first batch and had to bake them longer than recommended, but that was probably because I made the cookies too big. :P The remaining two batches came out beautifully crisp (after a bit of cooling, of course.) They weren't as thin as the original picture suggests, but the cookies were crisp almost all the way through, with just a slight hint of chewiness in the centre. Absolutely perfect!

Or they would be... The texture is anyway, but the cookie itself was nothing special. The dough tasted like any cheap mass-produced cookie - not very buttery and not at all melt-in-your-mouthy. That could be partly my fault though, perhaps I baked them for a shade longer than expected? But still, nothing to write home about :P Nevertheless, Hadi and Justin liked them well enough (but then they eat almost anything :P Anything sweet particularly, for Hadi) Also, the picture they gave is misleading :( Instead of that rich brown colour, my cookies, as you can see, were just the normal golden brown of chocolate chip cookies. That could just be the lighting, but still! :( I feel vaguely cheated :P

That's not saying that I didn't like the cookies though, hehe. They *were* nice, although again, not quite what I expected. (Foiled again! Gah!) Although I much prefer the chewy chocolate chip cookies (version 1 :P), I was happy enough with this so I clicked over to Amazon and bought the book (Tate's Bake Shop Cookbook) this was taken from, since I'm looking for a few baking books at the moment. The book is apparently based on the goodies of a very successful bakery in New York, with some celebrities as their clients, even! Can't be all that bad, yea? My baking adventures are rare, but hopefully they'll become a lot more common now :D Do look out for them, hehe. I already have yet another chocolate chip cookie recipe to try out, as well as a couple of muffin recipes ;)

In the meantime, my search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie continues!

Quote of the day: Americans have more food to eat than any other people and more diets to keep them from eating it.