Adults Only Chocolate Chip Cookies

You might be forgiven for thinking there is booze in these cookies but nay nay I say, what makes them more adult oriented (or a sophisticated kid) is the chocolate rounds (as opposed to chips) used in the cookies.

I am currently attending a fabulous and intense baking workshop with Galia Agayev, a professional baker or as they say here in Israel, Conditor, which is a 4 month, once a week for 4 hours at a time do. I love it and in addition to attending with my SIL Suzy (great fun!) am surrounded by like minded women (not a man in sight, hmmm) and my daughter Batya, who took the course before us, is the one who told us we must go. So we did. 🙂

I can wax ecstatic at length, but won’t 😉 I just want to give a shout out also to Chivit who works with Galia and is terrific and can’t wait to attend her bread baking seminar. Yay.

I bring this up specifically, because the chocolate rounds were purchased from Galia’s shop and they are a whole ‘nother level.

If you upgrade your chocolate, it elevates the cookies to sublime. Only thing to make it better would be butter. Sigh, one day.

Aaaaanyway, I confess, till I took this course I might have been a tad cavalier about creaming the butter/sugar mix (cremage, yet another nugget of trivia) and there is a difference in the texture of your cookies if you beat the mixture till lumps are gone and smooth, none of that lumps left on the beater that you say to yourself, no big, yeah, yeah it matters. And, once your are anyway beating this in a mixer, just beat a bit longer and use a rubber spatula to scrape down the beater and the sides. Really, do it.

Next, add the eggs, one at a time and make sure to beat until they turn light in color and are absorbed into the mixture and it looks like this

This is a creamy lumpless mixture and the cookies will bake up properly if you do this.

I’ve also learned to mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl with a whisk or fork since it also incorporates both the leavening (baking soda) and the flour properly. Add to the creamed mixture.

Note that it looks fluffy not dense. This is due to beating the butter/sugar well and eggs till fluffy. In the bowl is my terrific Oxo cookie scooper. It’s great for getting your cookies all the same size so that when you bake them, they need the same amount of time. You can use two spoons instead but keep an eye on quantity of dough you use so that the baking times are the same.

I ran out of parchment paper oyoyoy for me a disaster of almost unimaginable proportions (not) but still. I mercifully found a mock silpat to use on my baking/cookie sheets. It was great, btw. I’m gonna buy myself a few real silpats, they are good to roll stuff out on and are also non stick baking mats.

Now this recipe is from the back of the Oppenheimer’s chocolate chip packets. I mostly used their recipe with a small change. Interestingly enough, the recipe in Hebrew doesn’t match the one in English. The English one calls for a cup of marg/butter and the Hebrew one is for one package of margarine which is not a cup but rather 200 grams which is short of a cup by 27 grams. Not a huge difference, but a difference. So I used the cup’s worth of marg and added a 1/4 cup of flour.

I particularly like this version of cookie due to the texture of the outside
getting a crisp outer part and inside becoming chewy.

Now comes the absolute most important part of the whole thing. Refrigerate the dough. You can simply plunk the whole mixing bowl in the fridge. Let it chill at least 15 minutes, about how long you need to preheat the oven. This causes whichever fat you chose to use to solidify and then the cookies won’t spread out too much in the oven. Try to keep the unused portion cold in the fridge in between batches. It really changes the way the cookies bake up and their texture. This is really a rule of thumb in baking cookies in general.

Then, form into the balls and place a few inches apart to allow for spreading of the dough (see pic above) and bake at 375 for 9 minutes.

See how the cookies kept a nice shape and didn’t flatten out too much.

Take a bite and let out a moan of delight and understand how very much the quality of the chocolate you use in the dough changes the taste of the cookie-totally. I made these for my grandkids and waited to see if they’d notice a difference and they didn’t. Hence, don’t waste the good chocolate on the younger kids, save for your adults/sophisticated kids who will appreciate the deeper, richer flavor. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Adults Only Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup (227 grams) butter/margarine

1 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla or vanilla sugar

2 1/2 cups flour

pinch of salt (1/4 teaspoon or so)

1 teaspon baking soda

2 cups (300 grams) of good quality dark chocolate chips or rounds

Directions:

Beat the margarine together with both the white and brown sugar until smooth and creamy, about 5 minutes. Absolutely use a rubber spatula to scrape the sides of the bowl and the beater to make sure all the marg is incorporated into the sugar. You really want it smooth and lump free.

Next add the eggs one at a time (no cheating, if you add both eggs together, the mixture cannot catch up to itself and you will see it looking like cottage cheese instead of smooth. This means the fat is not properly mixed in and your cookies will get these weird pockets in them. Just trust me on this. One egg at a time and it’ll take a coupla minutes to incorporate. Patience isn’t just a virtue here, it’s also your friend. 🙂

Whilst it’s creaming merrily together, take out a bowl large enough to mix together the dry ingredients, flour, salt and baking soda. Stir together with a whisk so that the leavening is spread throughout the flour. Add the vanilla to the eggs/marg/sugar mixture. Gently, with the mixture on low speed, add the flour mixture just till mixed properly and lastly add the chocolate rounds just till mixed in.

Turn your oven to 375 degrees and pop your mixing bowl in the fridge to firm up the cookie dough. This should take about 15 minutes (both oven and dough cooling).

Take out your baking/cookie sheets, place silpats or parchment paper on them and form even balls of cookie dough, not allowing them too close to one another, about 2 inches apart. Otherwise they rise into a big mess in the oven as one gloppy cookie and ain’t that a shame after your hard work?

Bake in batches, keeping dough chilled in fridge in between, for 9 minutes and yeah, whisk them out of the oven on time, don’t overbake. When cooled, the outer perimeter is a bit crispy and the inner chewy. Just perfect!