As much as I miss Diana for her winning personality, I mostly miss her for her cookie sheets. It was with her cookie sheets that we first made the greatest cookies of our lives–you can read the recipe here. Meg of Megnut rejected these cookies when she tried them and called them “too thin,” but I still think they’re the best.
Yesterday I was all set to make them when I made a painful discovery: Diana, despite my efforts to thwart her, remembered to take her cookie sheets. Her cookie sheets, unlike mine, are flat with no sides and the cookies made on them came out perfect every time. The ones made on mine often got burnt around the edges or black underneath–my cookie sheets have sides.
I was almost ready to give up, when I had a “eureka” moment.
“What’s wrong?” asked Craig.
“I’m having a eurkea moment,” I answered.
The eureka was this: I could bake cookies on the BACK of my cookie sheets. Flip them upside down. Lay parchment across them and bake them that way. Look:
See what I mean?
So I made the batter as usual and, as I revealed in a previous post, I used an ice cream scoop to get the batter on to the sheets:
I also flattened them with a wet hand, a trick I learned from one of my regular TV shows (Barefoot Contessa)? They went into the 350 degree oven and I was going to switch the sheets after 9 minutes to cook another 9 minutes more, but at that point they were already a perfect golden brown and the edges were dark. So I made the executive decision to take them out 9 minutes early and guess what?
They were fantastic. I mean you saw that picture above, look at this one:
What more could you want from a cookie? And you can recreate these at home this weekend using my trick. Who needs Diana and her stinkin’ cookie sheets? From now on I will use her for her personality and nothing more.
Wow .. those cookies really do look delicious. BTW, I’ve read your book twice already. Congrats again!
simply genius…i love EUREKA moments…especially ones where you specifically know AND verbalise you are having one! HAHA and yes, the cookies look golden and delicious!
Me want cookie :)
See no difference between the two batches. But if i makes you happy..
Hello!
You have my newest favorite blog! I learned the parchment trick from my mom and I’m glad to see it’s not a secret. I love your writing and you’ve solidified my plan to make cookies tonight.
Wow, thanks for the great tips. These cookies look delicious!
i love your site…but since you reformatted, advertisements are covering half of your text…is it yahoo? am i the only one with this problem…what gives? please advise…thx gary
Those look so good! What’s the recipe!?
These had me so hungry when I read the post at work that I made them last night!! My husband thinks they are the best cookies ever and I must agree.
Adam, you need some Brillo for those cookie sheets.
Wow ~ you’ve nailed what I like to call the ‘shar pei’ technique – where the edges develop those layered wrinkled folds. It makes me so so happy to eat chocolate chip cookies like this, but I’ve only been able to get that effect by sheer luck. It’s something to do with the butter temperature and/or the oven temp, but eithter way, congratulations!
These look delicious. Before I even owned cookie sheets, I used to bake cookies on paper grocery bags. I would slide them into the oven with a giant piece of corrugated cardboard (kind of like pulling a pizza of a peel). To cool them, I put the paper bags on sheets of newspaper (the grease would leak through). Seriously, it works!
Oh, BABY those look crazy good. Seriously good. Diet killing-good.
Buttery crispy chocolatey good.
Me want.
Those look extremely good — but one fell slip of the parchment, and those cookies go flyin’ sideways. It’s an excellent trick for now, and you clearly did very well with it, but like any Jewish girl I worry about impending disaster: if not pogroms, cookie slippage. Somebody needs to tell Santa to leave some of those nice flat no-sided cookie sheets under the AG’s Chanukah bush…
I tried this, and it worked great. The only problem that I had was that when I put the pan in the edges of the pan, pointing to the bottom, slipped between gaps in the wire rack, which was of course very hot from preheating the oven, so I had to mess with the pan and big oven mitts to slide it on right. Next time I’ll know.
Also, I noticed that the recipe says it makes 36 cookies, but c’mon, I made 20, 24 tops with it. Next time I’ll try making them smaller. They were delicious and big and my family went crazy for them, which is always the real test for me :)
I plugged the recipe into calorielookup, which estimated the cookies at 150 calories (each!) but that was for a 36 cookie batch, so … um … take it easy on the cookies :)
http://calorielookup.com/food/view/47095
Cheers, Rick