It’s Furious Balancing

I don’t spend a lot of time in the kitchen; cooking and baking and such aren’t among my interests.  Teh Husband spends a lot of time perfecting his pies and enchiladas, but I prefer the eating to the creating.  My idea of cooking is thaw and reheat.¹

I am, however, a connoisseur of chocolate,² and one of my Christmas presents this past year was David Lebovitz‘ The Great Book of Chocolate.

This is not just another cute collection of chocolate recipes, but a primer in all things chocolate.  How to buy it, how it’s made, how to cook and bake with chocolate, u.s.w. The recipes are just the icing on the cake.

I was itching to try something from it and settled upon these.

Blue Chip Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed
• 8 Tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter (close to room temperature)
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup walnuts or pecans, toasted and chopped

—

1.  Preheat oven to 300°F (150° C).  Adjust oven rack to top 1/3 of oven.  Line 3 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

2.  Beat the sugars and the butter together until smooth.  Mix in the egg, vanilla, and baking soda.

3.  Stir the flour and salt together, then mix them into the batter.  Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.

4.  Scoop the cookie dough into 2 Tablespoon balls and place 8 balls, spaced 4 inches apart, on each baking sheet.

5.  Bake for 18 minutes or until pale golden brown.  Remove from oven and cool on wire rack.

Makes 24 cookies.³

Now, here’s the important stuff:

Use the parchment paper.  I never have used it before in any recipe that called for it, but now I know what a lovely invention it is.  It helps  prevent sticking and cleaning up afterward is ridiculously easy.  You can lift the entire sheet of paper, with cookies intact, to transfer it to the cooling rack.   Parchment paper will not catch on fire in your oven – not at 300°F anyway.  You’ll find it in the grocery store next to the aluminum foil.⁴

Don’t skimp on the quality of your ingredients.  In my cookies, both sugars, the flour,⁵ the egg, and the butter were organic.  The vanilla extract I had made myself by soaking sliced vanilla beans in light rum.  I used Guittard milk chocolate chips.  There’s an old saying about how you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Feel free to skip the nuts. These don’t need nuts.  There is a high chip-to-dough ratio in these lovelies and you will not miss them.

Give each cookie dough ball plenty of room.  A two-tablespoon-sized cookie dough ball is pretty darn big.  They will spread out during cooking.  A lot.

* * * * *

1. Actually, it’s Roll back foil to expose tater tots, but you won’t get the joke unless you’re an old fart like me. [↩]
2. The highlight of our trip to Paris last year was (for me anyway) the Pierre Marcolini chocolates and the Nutella crepes. [↩]
3. I did two batches and got 16 out of one and 18 out of the other. [↩]
4. In fact, the brand I got was from Reynolds’, who make aluminum foil. [↩]
5. King Arthur brand – unbleached and unbromated [↩]

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.