Fantastic M&M or Chocolate Chip Cookies

I have done it - perfected the chocolate-chip cookie. They come out chewy, delicious, and with the perfect amount of chocolate. Yum, Yum, Yum. Here is how:

Wet Ingredients

• 7/8 C melted butter (cooled)
• 2 mounded C white sugar (approximately 2 C + 2 T)
• 2 T molasses
• 1 1/2 T vanilla extract (I never actually measure, just a generous splash)
• 2 eggs
• 1 egg yolk

Dry Ingredients

• 3/4 t salt
• 3/4 t soda
• 3 C flour

Chocolate

• 1 medium bag dark chocolate M&Ms or 2/3 bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips (whole bag if you like it really chocolaty)

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 325-350 degrees F (the exact temp will depend on your oven. Try lower first, they may just have to cook longer).
  
• Cream butter, sugar and molasses at medium to high speed. The texture will become light and fluffy. When in doubt, let it mix a little longer.
  
• Add remaining wet ingredients and mix until smooth and airy. Make sure to scrape the sides at this time if needed (most stand mixers will need this).
• Add salt and soda and mix until fully combined.
• You will now add the flour. The key to tender cookies is this: only mix until the flour is combined. Over-mixing once the flour is added develops the gluten in the flour, and makes the cookies much less tender. So, on low speed, mix in 1C of flour at the time until it is almost combined.
• Add chocolate (chips or M&Ms) and mix until evenly distributed (in the process, the flour will finish combining)
• To make these cookies truly excelent, you want them BIG. They work as regular sized cookies, but are only good. I recommend you have a 35mm cookie scoop and do two scoops per cookie. You will want them about 2" apart on a non-stick mat or sheet of parchment paper.
• Bake for between 6-8min, rotate the pan 90 or 180 degrees, and then bake for another 6-8min. They are done when they are kissed allover with a faint golden brown. If you over-cook they will not be nearly as chewy.
• Let sit for 6-8min, and then take off the cooking mat/paper and let them cool on the cooling rack.
  

There you have it - fantastic chewy cookies. Now, you don't actually need to use the cookie scoop or rotate the pan while cooking, but I have to say, once I started these practices the quality of my cookies noticeably improved. Uniform cookies bake much more consistently, and the rotation helps compensate for uneven heating in ovens (which I think the majority of us suffer from).

My final recommendation for easy cookie making is one of these if you use a stand mixer. You don't need it, but you will be impressed at how quickly things mix and thrilled with the lack of side-scraping required.

Enjoy!


In all fairness, I must state that this recipe is further refined from the recipe found in this book (which is an excelent all-around cooking resource).