The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie
Since I had a new oven, and a new cookbook, I did not have much choice but to bake quite a bit this week. I took two steps forward in my effort to bake the Betty Crocker Cookie Book from start to finish. Last night, I made the "Giant Toffee-Chocolate Chip Cookies," which I will post about next week. Before that, on Tuesday, the first night with our new appliances, I took a stab at "The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie."
I was afraid I was running low on ingredients, so I hopped over to the Whole Foods for flour, sugar, and chocolate chips. Turns out I didn't need any of them, but my next recipe sure will have some high-end organic ingredients.
1 1/2 cups butter, softened
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 eggs
4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups chopped walnuts
4 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Preheat your oven to 375F. Cream together the sugars and butter, and stir in the eggs and vanilla. Add the flour, baking soda, and salt, and stir until blended. Then stir in the nuts and chocolate chips. If you have time, it is a nice touch to toast the walnuts in the oven on a baking sheet for 10 minutes before you add them to the dough.
A quick glance at these ingredients should signal that this is going to be a big pile of dough. That usually means there will be a lot of cookies. Not in this case. The recipe calls for 1/4 cup of dough per cookie. Rather than fuss with one of your measuring cups, I highly recommend investing in a #16 cookie/ice-cream scoop. It will vastly simplify and speed the process, and ensure uniform size (and thus uniform baking). They are available from Fantes, where I buy most of my kitchen supplies.
Using the cookie scoop, place the dough on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. These need a bit of space, so I did 9 cookies per sheet (3x3). The cookbook calls for 13-15 minutes in the oven, but I found they were ready at 12 minutes. Just keep an eye on them, pull them once they start to brown, then cool on wire racks.
These are very large, thick cookies. All that dough only made about 40 in my batch. They are also a bit cakier than the Award Winning Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies from Allrecipes I made in July, likely due to the increased white sugar. Very tasty, and very popular.
