Tough Cookie
Well…. it has been awhile. The fates, sport and uni seemed to have all conspired to keep us from blogging the past couple of months, but fear not! We have not abandoned this pursuit, and the interim between posts we have compiled a backlog of delectable foodie escapades to share.
One would be hard pressed to find a favourite morsel more ubiquitous than the ever-sacred Choc-Chip-Cookie. Glorified by our american cousins, this ensemble of butter, sugar, flour and chocolate is something many of us remember making as children. Even if we feel we have never indulged in food culture, everyone can appreciate the appeal of a warm, gooey cookie. And as such everyone has their personal favourite recipe.
In the spirit of sharing, I’ve decided to expose my cookie recipe, the only recipe I’ve ever considered vaguely secret. In the interests of avoiding plagiarism (ingrained deeply by University), the photocopied and scribbled-upon recipe I have declares that this originally comes from Jeffrey Steingarten’s It Must Have Been Something I Ate. However it seems to have been edited heavily, both by myself and the nameless food writer from The Age that I cut this from so I’m not sure how closely it resembles the original.
This cookie recipe is not for the pallid, tasteless cousins you can find with their miniscule chocolate chips, and visibly crystallised sugar. This recipe results in soft, buttery cookies with huge hunks of rich dark chocolate and uses no less than three types of sugar, at different grades of refinement. So do not buy chocolate chips. Buy a slab of your favourite chocolate (white or milk chocolate can be substituted, but I wouldn’t recommend it) and hack away my friends. And DON’T (as a friend of mine actually once did) refrain from adding the salt to make the cookies “sweeter”. It may seem unintuitive, but salt is in fact, a sweetener. Many methods of exacerbating flavours in cooking involves adding a counterpoint. By adding salt you give something for the sugar to contrast with.
Now a word of warning, I have found that whilst when prepared correctly these cookies are pure heaven, they can be sensitive to different ingredient brands or types of oven. This is why I’ve given below a range of acceptable flour proportions. Too little and they melt into a large puddle, too much and they remain in dough-ball shapes. I’ve found in Australia, in most ovens two cups is sufficient. However when I attempted to bake them during my stay in Japan, the different grades of ingredients there resulted an awful mess. You know you have gotten the amounts accurate when they melt enough to form small circular mounds, but do not spread into each other.
“The Ultimate Choc-Chip-Cookie”
Ingredients:
500g dark chocolate
2-2.5 cups plain flour
1tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking Powder
250g softened unsalted butter
2/3 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2/3 cup granulated white sugar
1tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
- Preheat the oven to 190C. Roughly chop the chocolate into large, delicious hunks, 1 cm or bigger, feel free to sample. After “natural wastage” you will have 400g of chocolate, reserve this.
-Sift together the flour salt and baking powder into a bowl.
Literally snapped our wooden spoon!
-In a separate large mixing bowl, cream together the butter and three types of sugar. Add the vanilla extract water and egg. Beat together and then add the flour mixture.
-After this is well combined mix in the chocolate hunks, the mixture will be quite stiff, so be wary of damaging cookware!
-Drop heavily heaped spoons of the mixture on to baking trays covered with baking paper and bake for about 10 mins or until golden.
- At this point my recipe advises me to eat some immediately, whilst this is an excellent idea, I find they are often too gooey to eat for a few minutes, so let them rest. But do enjoy them warm, it is an experience worth risking a few stray molten gobs of dough.
-Cam-
PS: A preview of a few upcoming posts!
-A Week of Onions
- Jelly Baby Vodka
- Cupcake Battle
And MUCH More!
I can attest to the deliciousness of these cookies, having had one which was still warm but had hardened a little and then another the next day – mmmmm so much chocolatey goodness!
Omnomnom – thank you for saving one for meeee
Also – update this page already, I demand more food to be created! Heheh.
These cookies certainly look good. Any chance of sending them to the Sunshine Coast lol!