Best Big Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Best Big Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies - last made June 18, 2010 from allrecipes.com

I have 2 go-to recipes for chocolate chip cookies. These are my ultimate comfort food and have the added advantage of being super easy to make. I've blogged about one of them before(http://pastrychefbaking.blogspot.com/2009/09/chocolate-chip-cookies.html) but realized I never included the recipe. The other one I haven't blogged about at all simply because all this time I thought I had already posted it but a search revealed nothing. So I'm about to correct one of those mistakes (will fix the other one later by adding the recipe).

I got this recipe from someone on one of my fitness boards who posted the link from allrecipes.com. At the time I first tried it, I was on my never-ending quest for a chocolate chip cookie recipe that could be baked in a non-convection oven and not spread too thin. I wanted thick cookies a la Specialty's (http://www.specialtys.com/) with great flavor and texture. This one had it. And it's even easier to make than my other go-to recipe because you melt the butter, add the rest of the ingredients, stir it up, and you're done - no messing with a lot of creaming and mixing. What I do after the dough is mixed is portion them out into cookie dough balls, line them on a plastic lid/cover and freeze in the freezer until firm. Once they're firm, I put them in freezer bags and bake them off whenever I need to. Now, these do spread so don't line them up too closely together. You can make the dough balls as small or as large as you wish but when you make them for the first time, I recommend making gigantic cookies just to get the full effect :).

These cookies come out crisp at the edges and chewy moist goodness in the middle. For the ones I made for our family picnic last weekend, I coarsely chopped Hershey's Kisses to use as the chocolate chips and that worked really well (not the same ones pictured here). No need to chop the kisses too small since you want nice big chunks. Here's the link to the recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Best-Big-Fat-Chewy-Chocolate-Chip-Cookie/Detail.aspx. I don't know who ElizabethBH is but kudos to her for a fantastic recipe.