Wednesday, 22 December 2010

Chewy chocolate chip cookies

So nothing says Christmas like a chocolate chip cookie. Well perhaps not, but the holidays do mean that I have bit more time on my hands for things like baking. Unfortunately though I am generally fine baking cakes, something always seems to go a bit wrong with preparing other baked goods. In the process of making these American-style chewy cookies I somehow managed to set fire to the greaseproof paper covering my baking tray.
Anyway, this is a very simple recipe courtesy of Smitten Kitchen, and as these are soft cookies the dough doesn't require rolling and cutting out but merely melding into small lumps. This is the recipe in grams rather than American cups.

Recipe (enough for around twenty decent sized cookies):
250g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt (I omitted this but used salter butter)
170g unsalted butter, melted
220g demerara sugar
100g caster sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
170g plain chocolate chips

Mix together the melted butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs and vanilla, and make sure they are all well combined. Pour this into the sifted flour and baking powder and gently mix. Put in the chocolate and continue mixing for a bit. I didn't use chocolate chips but instead chopped up the same weight of chocolate. I should probably have cut things smaller though as I had some issues with bigger chunks of chocolate melting and sticking, which made moving them off the baking sheet a bit of a pain.
But anyway you should end up with a buttery dough that you can squish together either with a tablespoon or your hands into golf ball-sized rounds. Place these on a lined baking sheet about 10cm apart, and bake for around 30min at gas mark 4. I was guilty of cookie over-crowding and ended up with some merging into each other. But as the finished product is quite soft they were easy enough to cut up again, though this did result in some odd shapes.
You may also need to adjust the cooking time depending on the size of your cookies, as some of my batches took longer than others.
What you should end up with is a cookie that slightly crisp at the edges, chewy in the middle and with chunks of oozing chocolate. Ideal scoffed with a hot chocolate in the winter months.

2 comments:

Chloe said...

Yum. Actually we always have a soft cookie at Christmas - a peanut butter dough rolled in sugar with a big chunk of chocolate in the middle - so these seem pretty season to me.
I love the kitchen on fire story too

TheFastestIndian said...

Oh well that's good then! It only occurred to me later than perhaps I should have added some xmassy spices or something.
I'm still not sure how I managed to set the tray on fire...