Perfectibaking

Maybe it was the man who invented a machine to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie.  Maybe it was learning about the chemistry behind these sweet treats.  Maybe it was just high time to forget the science and take a big bite through the crispy caramelized edge of an oven-fresh chocolate chip cookie and straight into its gooey melting centre.

I haven't made chocolate chip cookies in a surprisingly long time, and have had a wide range of success with my past batches.  One of my earliest baking memories, in fact, was making chocolate chip cookies.  It was a joint effort with my sister when we were being babysat, and our abilities were questionable at best.  Let's just say that our oven use was supervised, but our measuring wasn't... and salt does look a lot like sugar; Rochelle from Sport Relief Bake Off knows.  More recently I used a recipe from a Mrs. Fields' cookie cookbook, and loved them!  That's why this time I tried to find the same recipe online, leading me to Mrs. Fields' blog and her Blue Ribbon Chocolate Chip Cookies.

The recipe called for more chocolate than I had on hand (one bar) and for dark brown sugar when all I had was light.  So I adapted; I cut the recipe in half to offset the lack of chocolate (my waistline may also have thanked me) and, in an attempt to return some of the deeper caramel flavour, substituted one tablespoon of molasses for one tablespoon of the light brown sugar.  My adapted recipe is in the Recipe Box.

The recipe is very straightforward: whisk the dry ingredients in one bowl, cream the butter and sugar in another before adding the egg, molasses and vanilla, and then combine everything.  As with most recipes, over-mixing should be avoided.

After mixing, scoop out tablespoon-sized balls of dough, roll them up, and arrange them on the baking sheet.

I expected quite a bit of spread from the cookies - to be honest I thought they might have been one giant cookie when I took them out - but I took a chance and they were fine.  They spread at the start of the bake...

And then they puffed up.

They surprised me again when they didn't fall back down after I took them out of the oven... These were not the same cookies I'd made from the cookbook.  I don't know if that was because the base recipes were different, I checked the cookbook and the recipes are the same (thank you Mrs. Fields!), so it seems that either my method (ignoring the directions in the recipe or not ignoring them) changed, or the addition of molasses really made quite a difference.  I remember those initial cookies as being relatively flat, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle; the kind you could bend a bit without breaking.  This batch also bends without breaking, to a point, but are far thicker.  They aren't cakey or dry, but a bit crumbly in a good way.  The edges and surface have that carmelized sweetness, and the overall flavour is very nice.  I simply don't know what happened to give them their height; maybe it's my memory that's faulty.

I checked out this handy guide from Handle the Heat, but it didn't shed much light on my particular batch, as the only thick cookies she baked were the product of adding more flour to the recipe, which I didn't do.  She also reports that they were undercooked and gooey in the middle, which mine were not.  (That is, however, in line with what cookie machine guy suggested - see link above).  It seems like I'll just have to make them again - or a few more times - to experiment.  Darn.

Speaking of experiment, I made a discovery with this micro-batch of cookies: an ex-Balvenie canister holds one dozen of them, perfectly.

They aren't whisky, but they'll certainly do.