These days, the mere suggestion of spending more time in the kitchen can make me run for the hills faster than you can say "dishwashing phobia". But, cookies are my Achilles heel, my incurable vice, the one bad food habit (ok, along with chocolate and cake) that I just can't really seem to break. Ever since I was a little kid, my dad has affectionately referred to me as "Cookie Monster". (And yes, that is good enough for me.) I cannot count the number of times I've devoured an entire plate/box/bag of cookies--chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodles, whatever. I don't discriminate!--so quickly that I quite literally made myself sick. A few months will go by while I swear I will never do it again, for the sake of preserving both my waistline and my heart, and I'll think I've kicked the habit for good. But then, one day, like a foolish girl stuck on a bad boyfriend, I have a sudden relapse and indulge just one last time, because maybe this time things will turn out differently. Of course, they do not, but I'm ever the glutton for punishment.
Not surprisingly, it doesn't take much prodding to convince me to whip up a fresh batch of anything with the word "cookie" in the title. It makes me particularly happy to bake for someone other than myself. And so, when H hinted at the chocolate chip cookies, it was without hesitation that I ducked out of work three hours early (thank goodness for flexible work schedules), made a quick run through the grocery store, and set to work in the kitchen. About four hours later our apartment was awash in the delirium-inducing aroma of chocolatey-cookie-ness.
Only thing is, I didn't just make the chocolate chip ones. Oh no, if I'm going to bust out the Silpat and the Kitchen-Aid and crank that oven up to 375 in a tee-tiny kitchen with no air circulation, I'm really going to make it worth my while. I'd had my eye on some homemade oreos for quite some time now, and this was just the excuse I'd been waiting for. Two batches of cookies in one night? No problem.
OK, so they're not exactly like oreos, but they did make me consider swearing off those blue plastic packages for good. The cookies came out crackly-er and thicker than I expected, but this might be my fault, not the recipe's. In my efforts to multi-task, I whipped up the dough while I was still baking the chocolate chippers, and tucked it away in the refrigerator for about an hour. This may have been my first mistake; there isn't a whole lot of butter in these, so in order to be smooth and spread evenly, they probably need to be at room temperature before heading into the oven. Second, since I don't have a cookie scoop but still wanted them to all come out the same size, I rolled the dough into little balls and smooshed them flat on the parchment instead. Dough of any kind doesn't usually take well to over-handling, so this may have been culprit #2 for my misshapen biscuits. Appearances aside, though, they taste pretty authentic, and they even have an extra bit of chewiness in the center, which in my opinion makes them better. Oh, and I do wish I'd had clear vanilla on hand for the cream, so it would be really white, but taste-wise, it was still spot-on.
The chocolate chip cookies just don't present as well compared to the oreos, but they sure do hold their own in the taste-test department. I've been baking these for probably as long as I've been allowed to use the oven by myself; it's a pretty basic recipe, just the one printed on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip bag*. Safe, yes, but it yields just the right balance of brown-sugar-versus-white-sugar sweetness, and the texture sits happily in between chewy and crispy. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
*I'm guessing you've probably already got the Tollhouse recipe in your own cookie arsenal, especially if you're in the US, but if you need it just let me know.
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