A classic chocolate chip cookie recipe. Hardly revolutionary but it does the job! Gooey in the middle, crispy on the outside, and with a little salty twist that makes them impossible to eat just one.
Chocolate chip cookies. Done good. It's hardly rocket science. But there's a cookie, and then there's a cookie. These are the latter. Confused? Well, here is my recipe for chocolate chip cookies. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty standard recipe: melt the butter with the sugars and vanilla essence, add wet to the dry, don't over mix, chill before baking. Can't go far wrong.
Choosing your chocolate is probably pretty important. I like to use chocolate buttons that I roughly chop up into shards. The shards give the cookie a layered texture that's satisfying to bite into. I think roughly chopping a bar of chocolate would do the trick. I avoid shop bought chocolate chips as I find them a bit overly sweet and artificial.
I also read a fair bit on the internet about freezing/chilling your cookie dough before baking. Chilling the dough means they flatten out less in the oven, so you get a thicker, chewier cookie. Apparently freezing the dough gives you a better flavour, but I must admit I didn't notice a big difference in the flavour of the chilled and frozen doughs.
I think the top tips here are: don't over-mix the dough, use an ice-cream scoop, or a tablespoon measure to ball up the dough (this means your cookies are the same size and cook evenly), and if you're a salty/sweet kind of person, add a sprinkle of salt flakes to the hot cookie fresh out of the oven.
Beyond that... it's a cookie! There's no such thing as a bad cookie...right?!
Ingredients:
225g unsalted butter
200g white sugar
110g light brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
385g of plain white flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt (plus more for sprinkling on top)
260g chocolate chips
(I use posh chocolate buttons which I cut up randomly into shards, but any good quality chocolate chopped up will work)
Method:
1. Melt the butter. Mix in the sugars until they’re dissolved. Add the vanilla extract and the eggs and gently mix.
2. Add the dry ingredients (flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt). Mix until just incorporated, don't over mix.
3. Add chocolate chips/shards.
4. Use a 1/4 cup measurer to scoop balls of dough (so that’s 60ml balls). You could also use an ice-cream scoop. Just make sure they’re all even.
Then either:
Bake them for 9-11 minutes in an 180 degree oven.
OR.
Freeze the cookie dough balls for 24 hours and then bake for 20 mins in a 150 degree oven.
When they come out of the oven they will look like they’re undercooked. That’s OK. Just leave them to cool on the tray for 30 mins or so. When they come out of the oven I also give them a little sprinkle of salt on top, but that's up to you!