How to Make Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies

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It’s already a couple weeks into holiday baking season, and you haven’t even checked the levels on your bittersweet, semi-sweet, and milk chocolate chip bins, have you?

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Nestle Toll House DelightFulls Cherry Flavored Filled Morsels Product Review

Ghirardelli Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe Review

I’m writing this post for those of you who may not be comfortable bakers, but would like to produce a homemade cookie for the holidays. I’ve broken down Ghirardelli’s chocolate chip cookie recipe,^[2] adjusted, simplified, and expounded upon it, so that if you’re patient and careful, you’ll be able to produce a nice batch of cookies with it, without a ton of baking experience. At the same time, I tried out a new Nestle chip.

Ingredients

2 sticks butter
2¼ cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
¾ cup sugar
¾ cup brown sugar, packed
2 teaspoons vanilla^[3]
2 large eggs
12 oz. of chocolate chips^{[4, 5]}
1 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped^[6] (optional)

Instructions

You can go two ways with the butter: either take it out of the fridge, unwrap it, and let it sit for an hour to soften, OR partially melt it. Melted butter won’t incorporate air as well as softened butter, when creamed with sugar. Less air will result in a chewier, less cake-like cookie. Go with your preference. If you choose to melt the butter, place stone-cold sticks in a two-cup glass measure and nuke them for 1 minute, 20 seconds on 30% power, or until a pool of melted butter begins to collect on the bottom of the cup, and the sticks turn limp.
Don’t necessarily pre-heat oven to 375ºF. See “Chill,” below, before you do.
Stir flour with baking soda and salt; set aside.
With a stand mixer,^[7] beat butter with sugar and brown sugar at Speed 4 (medium) until creamy and lightened in color, about 2½ minutes. Add vanilla; don’t bother to stir.
Add one of the eggs. Mix on lowest speed, ramping up to Speed 2 after the yolk breaks. Continue on Speed 2 (low) until egg is incorporated. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Repeat this procedure with the 2^nd egg.
Blend one cup of the dry mixture into creamed mixture. Start the mixer with tiny pulses by toggling the speed switch barely into Speed 1 – just until the mixer starts – and then back to the off position. This will prevent flour from getting blown out of the bowl. After a handful of pulses, you’re safe to sustain Speed 1 until the flour incorporates. In this case, “incorporates” means that you no longer see any dry flour, except perphaps on the upper sides of the pan (where the beater won’t reach). Stop. Add a 2^nd cup of flour and repeat entire procedure. Stop. Add remaining flour and repeat entire procedure. Now you’re done. Scrape the sides of the pan with a rubber spatula to finish it off. Scrape all the way to the bottom of the bowl, because there may be a tiny bit of flour down there that the paddle couldn’t reach.
Stir in (nuts and) chocolate chips.
Chill. At this point, I recommend putting the dough in the fridge for as little as a half-hour, or as long as three days. It will improve the cookies’ texture, giving them more of a chewy-crunchy complexity. You’ll find the most dramatic improvement after the first day, and continued improvement – although subtly so – for up to three days. Three days is a long time, I realize. However, two advantages: first, it breaks up the overall work into smaller chunks. Second, it means you have chocolate chip cookies, ready to be freshly baked on a whim – you can produce them hot from the oven in less than 15 minutes. You could bake up a sheet tonight, another sheet tomorrow, another sheet up to a week later. Or you can freeze the dough in single-sheet capacity chunks for a couple months. It thaws quickly.
Drop by Tbs onto ungreased cookie sheets, or use a very fancy ¼-cup ice cream scoop^[8] to measure out the dough. Six scoops will fit on a 16″ x 14″ cookie sheet. This will produce cookies about 4″ in diameter, and the batch will yield 18 cookies. If you’re truly new to this, you need two (preferably identical) cookie sheets, since you can’t fit the whole batch of cookies onto one sheet. You want one in the oven and a second ready to go. I use Wilton Recipe Right Air insulated, non-stick cookie sheets and never – I say never – have I had cookies stick to them.
Bake for 9 to 11 minutes. The cookies should brown around the edges, and the brown should reach in about 1/3 of the way toward the center of the cookie before you pull them out. Allow the cookies to rest on the sheet for 3 minutes before relocating them to a cooling rack.

Review Results

This is a respectable recipe. You’ll be proud of these cookies. They’re very homemade. A little bit of crunch, tender inside, light texture. Perfectly stackable – huge plus. The entire batch will fit nicely into an 8″ x 5¾″ x 5½″ container. They couldn’t pass the qualifying round to enter into competition with Jacques Torres’ Secret Chocolate Chip Cookies, but they’re also not imposing or intimidating. (If you’ve never been intimidated by a chocolate chip cookie before, consider yourself blessed … or naïve, depending on your psychological constitution.)

As far as the cherry chip goes, Nestle’s nailed the flavor of a cordial. A cordial-flavored chocolate chip cookie, though … I have to give a resounding meh. It’s a flavor I’d better appreciate in a wholly chocolate context. It also bothers me that there’s no visual indication of cherry; that winds up making me feel that the flavor is artificial – which of course it is, but no one wants to be reminded of it. Note that there is a visual indication of cherry when you bite into an uncooked chip, but once baked into a cookie, I don’t see it. Further note that the flavor of the baked chip in its cookie context is significantly superior to the flavor of the unbaked chip alone. I will add that when I returned to the cookies a few hours after my initial taste, I found that the cherry flavor dulled a bit – which is a good thing. I was happier with the cookies at that point. Still, I’m thinking a combination of these chips plus chopped marichino cherries in a chocolate cake or cookie might be a better idea.

Notes:

[1] Spoiler Alert: Cherry Flavored Delightfulls are made almost exclusively of fat, with a tiny bit of carbs thrown in.

[2] Recipe on the Bag: Note that the recipe on the back of the Ghirardelli bag isn’t quite identical to the one they have posted online. Online, they call for 11½ oz. of chips, whereas the recipe on the bag calls for 2 cups. Both amounts are strange, since a bag weighs 12 oz., which is less than 2 cups. I like the former measurement, however, because it allows you to eat ½-oz. of chips while you’re baking.

[3] Vanilla: If you don’t already have a bottle of man-made, hand-made, ideologically superior vanilla brewing, you’re way behind the game.

[4] Any type of chip will work. If you’d rather shun the experimental new chips, and just go with tried-and-true chocolate chips, you can use whatever type of chocolate you want EXCEPT milk chocolate. Milk chocolate is too sweet and melts too quickly. It has a tendency to blend into the batter, and you want a chip that will contrast with the batter. Other than that, it simply depends on how dark of a chocolate flavor you like. Semi-sweet is the iconic choice. Don’t feel you have to use Ghirardelli brand. In fact, I very much like Hershey and Nestle chips in a chocolate chip cookie. If I were going to When I eat chips right out of the bag, though, I absolutely prefer Ghirardelli, no contest.

[5] A standard-size bag of chips is 12 oz. Note that DelightFulls come in a 9-oz. bag.

[6] Chopped: You can buy nuts already chopped.

[7] Mixer: Even though you don’t do a lot of baking, I assume you registered for a stand mixer when you got married, and now that thing just collects dust somewhere in your kitchen. I’m not going to judge you, you greedy sonofabitch. Get that thing out of the cupboard and use it. If you don’t have one, you can use a hand-held. However, once you get to the part where you have to add flour, abandon the hand-held and go with a nice, thick, wooden spoon or a large rubber spatula. If you press on with the hand-held, you will over-burden it, while overworking the dough. You can, if you want, do this whole thing with a wooden spoon. You’ll have to work it with some muscle and stamina, but you’ll get fantastic results if you do, and you can be damn proud of yourself. You’ll probably also be twice as likely to slap someone’s hand if they go for a second cookie.

[8] Ice Cream Scoop: Somewhat expensive, but worth it. Heavy duty! No way you’re busting this thing! Not only will you finally stop bending all your soup spoons when you try to dish up ice cream, but it so easy to use on cookie dough, and produces uniform-sized cookies. You can also use it to fill cupcake wrappers and muffin tins.