Chocolate Chip Cookies v4 (with Maltesers)

Hoho, haven't had the time to continue on my quest to find the perfect cookie lately, but the 4th installment is finally here. :D As a summary of my cookies so far, v1 and v3 were very similar - quite chewy, while v2 was a bit too dry. How will v4 fare? :D

This isn't actually a "pure" chocolate chip cookie, but its as good as one, hence the version 4. This is from yet another food blog, Grab Your Fork. I love food blogs. They can be quite creative (in cooking), and the writers really try hard to perfect their recipes. I'm not quite there yet, but someday... :D So anyway, here we go!

What you need:
250g butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup sugar (I used vanilla sugar, reduced to 1/2 cup)
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups plain flour, sifted
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup malted milk powder (I used Horlicks)
200g dark chocolate, broken into chunks (I reduced to 150g)
100g Maltesers, smashed in the bag (I increased to 150g)

What you do:

1. Cream the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer at low speed.
2. Add the eggs gradually, beating well between each egg.
3. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.
4. Place large tablespoonfuls of the mixture onto baking trays lined with baking paper. Make sure that there is plenty of room between mounds to allow for spreading (recommended 5 per tray).
5. Bake at 150 C for 20-25 minutes, depending on how crispy you like them. For crispier cookies, bake for 30 minutes.

I forgot myself and creamed the butter and sugar at quite a high speed. But in this kind of weather, its really hard to get the butter soft. :P I put it on the heater to soften, took it off and prepared the other ingredients (didn't want it to melt while I was busy). By the time I was ready to use it, it was not soft anymore. Grrrr! So I needed the high speed. :P

But anyway, maybe because of that, my cookies spread *quite* a lot. One heaped tablespoon of dough made a cookie much bigger than the palm of my hand. Surprisingly though, the cookies were not at all cakey. They were very thin and mostly crispy, with just a hint of chewiness. They were, in fact, very very good. The best yet, I would say! Very very close to Famous Amos (in texture, if not in shape :P). Only Famous Amos has no chewiness at all. I am also utterly convinced that they use dark chocolate in their chocolate chip cookies. Or at least semi-sweet chocolate. Because the bits with the chocolate chunks tasted amazingly close to Famous Amos!!! *so excited* Progress at last~!

On a side-note, while both me and Hadi liked the crispy parts (from the edges to almost all the way in the middle), Justin thought it wasn't chewy enough. I can't emphasize enough just how different people's "perfect cookies" would be like. Keeping this in mind, do read on. ;)

Although, this wasn't actually how I thought the cookies would turn out. I didn't taste the malt in the Maltesers OR Horlicks at all! I didn't even taste the Maltesers. Might have been partly my fault, I think I crushed them into too fine pieces, but still. Rather a big let-down. I love Maltesers. :P As my Maltesers "cake" might have suggested, haha. So, I might try this recipe again. Only with a LOT more Horlicks, and with no dark chocolate. Just large pieces of Maltesers all the way through, hehe.

But anyway, this cookie is very very close to what I would like for the texture of my perfect cookie. :D I *might* try freezing it before baking next time as well, to prevent the cookie from spreading too much. I hope this won't adversely affect the texture. :S And of course, no beating the butter and sugar at too high speeds, hehe. I *would* like to try again this week, but I don't think we'll be finishing this batch any time soon. This recipe makes a LOT of cookies, and all of them large ones. I shudder to think how many rounds I would have to make to cook smaller cookies. I even had to transfer to a pot to do the final mixing, since my mixing bowl was not large enough. That has *never* happened before... :S

I think I should also buy a new baking tray. :( Mine at the moment is silver-coloured, which would reflect quite a significant amount of heat. As a result, the bottoms of my cookies are always not quite cooked compared to the tops. Even putting it on the lower shelf of the oven doesn't help, sigh. I always have to give it a second round, this time with the bottom sides up. I get it before my next cookie adventure, hehe. ;)

Quote of the day: Broken cookies don't have calories.