I have 2 favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes. One is the more traditional, chewy, sweet cookie and the other is less sweet and more cakey. Both are thicker than the normal Toll House variety which is why they made the favorites list. I'm currently on a kick to try and combine the best of both cookie recipes into one.
Must have for my perfect chocolate chip cookies:
1. Milk chocolate chips - preferably the big Guittard chips or milk chocolate chunks (yeah, I know you semisweet lovers are baffled but hey, it's my sweet tooth).
2. Thick - remember thin is a bad word when it comes to most baked goods, see earlier blog post. So I need a cookie that doesn't spread much when baked in a regular oven. Convection ovens are great because they'll often bake the cookie before it's had time to spread very much. But I don't have a convection oven so I have to adjust the recipes to work in my normal oven.
3. Need a perfect combination between chewy and cakey - this is the toughest thing for me to nail so far. I don't like cakey cookies or crisp cookies (as a rule but there are some exceptions) or cookies grainy from too much sugar or greasy from too much butter.
4. You can get chewy cookies by underbaking but I don't like them so underbaked that they're still cookie dough. Again, the cookie dough lovers will be baffled by this but I'm that rare cookie baker who never eats cookie dough when making cookies. It's raw dough. Ewwww. I've had many an argument with cookie dough lovers over this but the most they can do is shake their heads and look at me in pity. Doesn't work. I still won't eat cookie dough. My friend Annie loves cookie dough and her tag line is her cookies are for people who love cookie dough more than cookies. But I like Annie's cookies so I don't think that's the definition of cookie dough I'm talking about. I mean the stuff that's still in the mixing bowl and doesn't make it onto a cookie sheet that goes into the oven.
5. Crisp edges when eaten 10 minutes out of the oven but the middle is still soft and chewy. When it cools, it's okay for some of the crispness to be gone but still would be good for it not to be too soft around the edge. That's what you need to offer a different texture contrast from the middle.
This is my 3rd test batch of starting from the chewy cookie dough recipe and modifying it to be closer to the cakey one. I think I overshot towards the cakey and not enough on the chewy. What's the difference? The cakey one is what it sounds like - more like a little blob of a dense cake. The chewy, well, it just tastes like a chocolate chip cookie. I did like how these turned out in size and thickness though. The taste was pretty good too. But I still have to work on the texture to be more cookie-like rather than cake-like.
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