Recipe Fun Friday: Chocolate Chip Cookies

I received an email from John on Sunday with the subject "Cookies." What in the world is this email about? I wondered. When I clicked it open, he asked me to try this recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I was already planning to bake some chocolate chip cookies this week; it was just a different recipe that I wanted to try. Why not make my husband happy by trying out his recipe first? (John doesn't usually ask me to try recipes. Occasionally, he will look through a cookbook and point out one or two recipes he would like for me to prepare, but he has never emailed me a recipe before.) Chocolate chip cookies are our favorite, but we like them chewy instead of crunchy. I have searched and searched for a good, chewy cookie recipe, but I haven't been lucky so far.

So Wednesday afternoon, Sarah Beth, Daniel, and I prepared the cookie dough. Wednesday seemed like a good time since we have church that evening, and my children might not mind (as much) not baking the cookies immediately.

Then yesterday afternoon while Rachel napped, we baked the cookies. The dough was a little hard since they had been refrigerated overnight, but my scoop was able to handle it. Then, of course, we had to sample them. What do you think? Do you think my children enjoyed them? Rachel woke up in time to get one, too.

More importantly, what did John think? He loved them! He said that they were the best cookies I've made. Wow! These cookies are very good, and they are chewy! If you're looking for a good, chewy chocolate chip cookie, you should try these.

If you click over to the original recipe, you'll see that it calls for pastry flour. Have you heard of that before? I hadn't. When I looked it up online, I discovered that pastry flour has less gluten (the sticky part of flour) than all-purpose flour but more than cake flour. So you can substitute some of each in a ratio of 2:1 all-purpose flour to cake flour. That's what I did, what I had to do, since our grocery store in this little town doesn't carry pastry flour.

Also, if you print out the original recipe, you'll discover that it makes 8 1/2 dozen cookies, and I didn't think that my mixer would handle that much dough. And I didn't feel like chopping up chocolate, so I just used chocolate chunks and chips. (I forgot to buy enough chunks.)

So here's the recipe that I used, after all of my tweaking:

Ingredients:

1 cup butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup packed light brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 cup AP flour

1/2 cup cake flour

3 cups bread flour

1/2 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

1 bag (11.5 oz) chocolate chunks

1 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

• Cream together the sugars and butter.
• Add eggs.
• Add flours, baking powder, baking soda, and vanilla. Mix well.
• Add chocolate.
• Let dough sit at least 24 hours in the refrigerator before baking.
• Scoop cookie dough onto baking sheets.
• Bake at 350 for 10 - 15 minutes until lightly browned but still soft.
• Cool slightly on baking sheets before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

I'm not sure what refrigerating the dough for 24 hours does, but I did it. And it made clean-up easier because I was able to clean up all the mess from making the dough on Wednesday and the mess from baking the cookies on Thursday. That was kind of nice!

Oh, and I got almost six dozen cookies from my halving the recipe; apparently, the person who came up with this recipe used a bigger cookie scoop than I did.

Does your husband ask you to try out new recipes? Does he email them to you? (I think he just did that because it was the easiest way to get the website to me.)