To Make The Ultimate Cookie

To Make The Ultimate Cookie

Ahhh……the smell of freshly baked, homemade, chocolate chip cookies can top anything for me. The finished product of chocolate chip cookies is the best thing…when biting into that warm, chocolate chip cookie that has just been baked in the oven to perfection is a complete culinary delight. Although one can bake at any time of the year, I relate baking to one of the many joys of Christmas.
From an early age, I watched my mom bake feverishly in our kitchen for Christmas. As early as I can remember, I loved watching her prepare desserts for Christmas time. Watching her take several ingredients that looked like nothing special and seeing the finished product of delicious cookies was something that struck me with amazement.
I began baking with her when I was around five years old with the easy tasks of mixing her ingredients and leveling off flour and baking soda. As I grew up, I began to take on the more challenging jobs of cracking the eggs and measuring out certain ingredients. Once I turned eleven years old, I began baking desserts all on my own, and it became one of my favorite hobbies. Although I would also bake sporadically during the year, Christmas time was when both my Mom and I seriously took on the task of baking sometimes up to fifteen hundred cookies. Boxed recipes don’t exist in my house…only homemade things are created and made in our oven, and that itself makes baking with my mom more special.
The task of baking cookies is very simple if you have any experience with baking at all, but baking ones that have an amazing taste rather than the standard chocolate chip taste is what’s challenging and demonstrates talent. For example, take the standard ‘Chips Ahoy Chocolate Chip Cookie’. This un-natural, mass produced, tasteless, flat, processed cookie can’t come close to comparing with a freshly baked, moist, flavorful, buttery, warm, and chewy chocolate cookie.
Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, is credited with inventing the Chocolate Chip cookie. Supposedly, one day in 1930, she cut a Nestlé’s Semisweet Yellow Label Chocolate bar into small chunks and added it to her butter cookie dough; this eventually became known as today’s popular Chocolate Chip cookie recipe.
When making chocolate chip cookies, it is important for one to follow the recipe carefully so that nothing goes wrong along the way. Before baking anything, it is important to always re-read the recipe before actually beginning baking, just to assure that you have all the necessary ingredients and supplies needed. One of my favorite Chocolate Chip cookie recipes is Nestlé’s Toll House recipe, but the secret ingredient that makes the cookies that much better is vanilla pudding. If you’re used to making a certain kind of recipe countless times, one may try and experiment with different ingredients and or by adding different things and my Mom did a few years ago with the Nestlé’s Toll House recipe.
After gathering all your ingredients and pre-heating the oven to 375 degrees, it is time to begin baking. In a medium-mixing bowl first combine your sugars (¼ of a cup of white and ¾ of a cup of brown) and 1 cup of butter until they form a very creamy, fluffy mixture. Following this, add two eggs, one a time and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, beating after each egg addition. A warning I have for you that deals with mixing is to make sure you do NOT over mix and beat your ingredients. Just do it enough to create a light fluffy mixture which usually takes no more than three minutes.
In a separate mixing bowl, add your dry ingredients, which include 2 ¼ cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, and 1 package of instant vanilla pudding. After mixing this well, you will then add it to your other mixture, periodically mixing well after each addition. While doing this, you should have a rubber spatula at hand to scrape the sides of the bowl throughout the mixing. After both mixtures are completely incorporated, you can finally add 2 cups of Chocolate Chips; the ingredient that makes the cookie what it is.
This process should take about fifteen minutes, and after finishing this process your next step is to roll your dough into individual balls. You can make the size of the dough balls to your liking, meaning you can either use a teaspoon or tablespoon measurement. Make sure that once you choose the size of your dough balls, place them that you space them about three inches apart so you allow room for rising of the cookie. Bake eight to ten minutes or until lightly brown. After the cookies are baked, allow them to cool for up to ten minutes.
For me, these ten minutes are the longest and most tedious part of baking this chocolate chip cookie. Even now, after I take the cookies out of the oven, the first thing I want to do is taste them to see how they turned out. After years of practice, I can say I have made good and bad batches of cookies. Unfortunately, if you accidentally use baking soda rather than baking powder it makes a huge difference. Also, if you melt your butter too much, their taste will suffer because that will help prevent your cookies from rising to their fullness. I recall a few years ago a little incident that occurred with one of my first cookie recipes. After preparing the cookie dough and finally rolling and placing the cookies on the tray, I wanted to surprise my Mom by baking the brownies before she got home. I quickly threw them into the oven without noticing that I hadn’t spaced them out far enough, so as they baked, they were all attached and stuck to one another. You could say I learned my lesson about spacing cookies out far enough. My word of advice is to make SURE that you place your cookies at least three inches apart from each other.
To make the ultimate cookie, it is necessary to follow recipes that will allow your finished dessert to be scrumptious. After years of practice and baking hundreds of different recipes, I have found that the core of each recipe is partially the same, but there are a few slight alterations that make each recipe different. Baking will always be my special avocation, and without my mom’s hobby of baking, my interest probably never would have developed and I would have missed out on a whole world to which I am very interested.