Tasty Treat: Best Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Einstein's theory of relativity changed the course of science; so too will my Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies change the course of, well, my baking at least. It's been years and years of off again on again experimentation and finally, finally, finally I've discovered the most amazing chocolate chip cookies. Crispy, chewy edges with soft chewy innards, my dream cookie, are now a reality.


I'm one of those people who's tried every single chocolate chip cookie recipe: The Neiman Marcus Cookies, the New York Times Cookies, Willie Mae's cookies. I've ripped recipes out of newspapers and magazines and copied them from books. However, what changed things for me was finally realizing that brown sugar makes things softer - that's what Dorie Greenspan said. So, rather than add equal parts white and brown sugar, I shook things up and bet in favor of brown, dark brown muscovado sugar to be exact. The only problem was, while the cookies were chewy, they were also pancake-flat.

To unflatten them, I remembered back to a time long before the great brown sugar discovery. Two years ago, my niece and I made cookies together at my grandmother's beach house. While we got the eggs from a farmer's market, they might have been from a farm on 3 Mile Island because every single egg had a double yoke. Seriously, it was weird. While we used two eggs like the recipe called for, there were four yolks. I expected a disaster, but those cookies were soft and perfectly shaped: thin, but not flat.

So last Sunday, before I realized that baby girl was running a 104.5 fever, I whipped up these cookies. Straight from the bowl into the oven they were pretty tasty. Almost there. But, because baby girl required lots of mommy cuddles, the extra cookie dough went into the fridge overnight. There, my friends, is how baby girl's fever helped me make the best ever Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies: chewy, soft, chocolatey, sugary and worthy of a milk-dunk.

Best Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

(Like my good friend, Martha Stewart, I use an ice cream scooper to get uniform cookies. It works really well and allows me to know exactly how long to bake them: for my ice cream scoop size, 14 minutes is perfection.)

What You'll Need:

2 cups White Whole Wheat Flour

1 tsp Baking Soda

1 tsp Salt plus a pinch to grow on

1 cup Sweet Butter at room temperature

2/3 cup White Sugar

1 1/3 cup Muscovado Sugar (or dark brown sugar)

2 eggs plus 1 egg yolk

2 tsp Vanilla Extract

2 cups Guittard Extra-Semisweet Chocolate Chips

Add the dry ingredients to a bowl, whisk them together and set aside.

In a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, blend the sugars and butter together on medium-high until light and fluffy. Turn off the mixer and scrape down the sides. Set the mixer on medium and add the eggs one at a time and then the vanilla. Scrape down the sides and turn down the mixer to low. Slowly add the flour mixture and mix until just incorporated. Turn off the mixer and incorporate the chocolate chips by hand. Place the dough in the fridge and chill for a couple hours or overnight. 

When you're ready to cook them, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and then scoop out equal size balls of dough and place on your cookie sheet. Mine were perfect after 14 minutes in the oven, but it really depends on how big your cookies are. You want them to be brown around the edges and soft in the middle, not raw. Cool them on a rack and enjoy!

Approximate Cost:

Groceries: $7
Cost per Meal: I think you'll get 3-4 dozen cookies out of this