Do you believe in soulmates? I mean really.
I believe there are many people out there for us—there isn’t just one that we’re meant to find. (How else could we justify our threesomes?) I feel the same way about cookies. There isn’t just ONE cookie that will be your favorite cookie. You’ll encounter many amazing cookies in your lifetime. That’s what life’s all about, y’all.
But now I’ve changed my mind. There IS only one soulmate, because there is only one cookie. This is the cookie. It comes from A Spoonful of Sugar which I will visit now on a regular basis. (It is frustrating, however, because I had to convert everything from grams to cups. Stupid metric system!) Sorry, I love the metric system. I have nothing against it.
Laura Floyd pointed me to this recipe when I admired the cookies at Jacques Torres’s place. She was dead on—these cookies are JUST like those. Only I messed this batch up a bunch. But regardless of that, they were still terrific. Watch.
Ok, so first I had MAJOR brown sugar issues. The recipe require what I determined was 1 cup of brown sugar. My brown sugar was SOLID…SOLID AS A ROCK. (Name that 80s group!) So I used the recovery method printed on the side of the box. It said: put the brown sugar in a bowl, which I did. Then cover with 2 wet paper towels and plastic wrap.
Put in microwave on high for 1 minute and 30 seconds. Careful, the sugar will be hot.
Well I did and took the bowl out and uncovered it and the sugar was cold and still SOLID…SOLID AS A ROCK. (Seriously, name that 80s group). What I didn’t realize was that when I set the power to “high” I tried to set it to 10 and really only set it to 1. So I put it back in the microwave for another 1 minute and 30 seconds the right way but thinking that it wouldn’t get hot again because I’d just done it the right way, didn’t I?
No. You didn’t. Because this time the bowl was freaking hot and I peeled back the cover and saw this:
Yikes, I made caramel. Should I stop here? Should I not make cookies?
A lesser person would have said: YES. STOP HERE. But I am not a lesser person. I picked the caramel out and proceeded. There were crunchy caramel bits in the batter but I didn’t taste them in the cookies.
The recipe is easy once you make the conversions. I like the fact that you MELT the butter. I’ve never done that with cookies. It was awesome. Here’s the doughy mush in the bowl:
Put it in 1/4 cup scoops on to your Silpat:
Then bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Smells great. Take them out. Then this instruction was kind of nutty: after one minute, put them on a cooling rack. Well after one minute, they’re still a goppy mess. And this is what resulted on my cooling rack:
Ok, you can’t really see, but the cookies got folded over and mushed up and destroyed. So I left the others on the baking sheet and came back 20 minutes later and ate one.
Heaven! Honestly, this is the cookie. This is my soulmate. Crunchy on the outside (but not crunchy in the Chips Ahoy sense; crunchy in that there’s a snap to it when you bite in) and soft and delectable on the inside. To quote the spoonful of sugar lady: like a truffle. Yes, like a chocolate chip cookie truffle on the inside. Trust this recipe. Love this recipe. It is your soulmate.
It’s simply too late to begin a baking expedition, but I am inspired and will bake these for my husband tomorrow.
Thank you!
I made these too! They were amazing. My dough was a lot thicker than yours though so that when I used a 1/4 c. measuring cup they actually kept the shape of the measuring cup. They turned out perfectly.
I’m intrigued. Where is the recipe?
I made these too! They were amazing. My dough was a lot thicker than yours though so that when I used a 1/4 c. measuring cup they actually kept the shape of the measuring cup. They turned out perfectly.
Dana – I believe the recipe in question is here.
My personal tweak: Milk chocolate chips? Are you kidding me? Ghirardelli doubles all the way.
I recently read that if you have hard brown sugar, instead of using the microwave which only makes the sugar hot and doesn’t really make it soft, you should wrap the block of sugar in wet (wrung out) paper towels, then wrap in clingfilm and leave it to sit for a few hours. You can also put the block of sugar in a Tupperware container and add a slice of apple. Granted, these aren’t quick fixes, but if you have some hours to spare, they should work better.
I’ve always used Luisa’s wet paper towels method. It actually doesn’t take all that long if you go back it ever few minutes and scrape away any sugar that has loosened (so the paper towel stays in contact with the hard stuff). I buy my brown sugar in a bag now instead of a box, and if I keep it rolled up tight it never seems to harden.
(Also, can I make a confession? I don’t like Ghirardelli double chocolate chips. They taste too fruity & bitter to me. I’ve recently developed a taste for Scharffen Berger–I feel it has that dark, liqueury richness but without the bitter tone. Unfortunately it also costs 87 gazillion dollars a bar. Meh. Guess I’ll have to keep tasting new brands. Woe is me!)
you should get a terra cotta brown sugar thingie
That would be Ashford and Simpson, right?
Can somone help with conversion to cups etc. i am hopeless at it! Thanks!
Best all-time brown sugar tip: once opened, store your brown sugar tightly sealed in its poly-whatever bag, bag inside the box, airtight as you can make it, and PUT IT IN THE REFRIGERATOR. You will never again make burning-hot caramel or mess around with wet paper towels or bash your fingers with a meat tenderizer as you try to pound unyielding lumps that are more solid than Ashford and Simpson. I don’t remember where I learned that, but it works so well that I’ve never even used the little terra-cotta keep-the-brown sugar-soft thing that someone gave me.
Other thing: try dark brown muscovado sugar, which is usually in the section of British ingredients in fancy food stores. Unless it’s in the sugar section. It costs the earth, but for recipes where you want lots of rich dark smoky caramelly molassesy flavor, it’s quite amazing.
Okay. You rule. Those were splendiferous cookies. I made them last night because you convinced me and husband was quite happy to arrive home to that smell wafting through the house.
As for conversions I can highly recommend a little software program called Master Converter. It changes anything into almost anything else with the click of a button. Very, very easy to use.
http://www.savardsoftware.com/
Thanks for the site for conversion. I’ll give it a shot!
here’s donna hay’s conversion page.
http://www.donnahay.com.au/Section.jsp?sectionid=1160856
I made these last night and they’re wonderful, even though I screwed up and my oven was too hot and I forgot to grease the pan (oops).
My husband still enjoyed them. And I actually think they’re better the day after!
I was just looking at the Cook’s Illustrated version of Thick & Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies, and they are VERY similar to this recipe. The sugar content is a bit higher in this version, though. I kind of want to take this discussion further, maybe on chowhound? Whaddya think?
A girlfriend and I made these last night for a Superbowl party today and everyone loved them! They were just as good the second day as they were fresh out of the oven (okay, well maybe not, you can’t beat fresh out of the oven but you know what I mean). I will definitely make these many times in the future. Thanks, AG!
I made ’em too and they were like the hit of the century. The recipe on the back of my chocolate chip package was alllllmost exactly the same with slight variations.