Chocolate Chip Cookies

I didn’t really think about making chocolate chip cookies until I realised the amount of chocolate chips I still had in my pantry. Three Callebaut types: white, ruby and pure dark from Cuba. Expiry date, end of 2019. (It’s ironic how you always notice the expiry date very close to the actual expiry date, or often, just a couple of days after it already expired…) So I had to act quickly and find some really good recipes with heavy chocolate content. Alternatively, I could just make lots of chocolate chip cookies that I can share with people on every single occasion possible. Someone’s birthday? Have a cookie! Halloween coming? Make Halloween chocolate chip cookies. Saint Nicholas? No problem. And in case you have any doubts, there is no better Christmas present than a box of delicious chocolate chip cookies, with ribbon and everything.

You might wonder how I ended up with so many chocolate chips. (Or you don’t, but I’ll tell you anyway). It’s simple, and it actually explains how I always end up with surplus of cupcake sprinkles, fondant paste and other cake decoration stuff that I eventually need to throw away. It goes a bit like this. I see this incredibly looking cake on Instagram or Pinterest (or cupcake or other kind of dessert), and I impulsively decide to make it. I go to my favourite cake decorations web shop to buy the decorations and special ingredients I need. While looking for the stuff I actually need, I see a lot of stuff that I actually like. And I quickly imagine all the other great recipes and desserts I would create. I say to myself, OK better to buy them all now so I pay the shipping costs only once. Three months later, they sit in the same drawer I put them when the super-fast driver came to deliver them. Because the one element I keep on forgetting when I think about baking is time. Baking takes time and you can only do so many things in a day or in a week or in a month. When I see the food pictures and start imagining the amazing things I could make, I should pinch myself and realize I’m entering a reality distortion field. My brain projects an imaginary world where I bake from morning till evening. In reality, I have timeframes of maximum a couple of hours during weekdays and maybe a couple more hours during the weekends to cook, bake, take pictures, write, and other activities from this category.

The moral of the story? Before shopping online for ingredients, try to 1. Assess how many times you will want to make the same recipe or a variation of it; 2. Calculate how long it takes to make it and re-assess how realistic was your answer to question number one; 3. Have a plan B in case you approach expiry date; 4. Don’t fall for that free shipping above a certain amount tagline. It’s all marketing blah blah…

Ingredients

(All at room temperature)

250 g butter (one pack)

130 brown sugar or candy sugar (I use this one)

130 granulated white sugar

2 eggs

4 ml vanilla essence (or 2 capsules from Dr. Oetker)

300 g flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

300 g chocolate chips

Preparation

Step 1

Preheat oven at 190° and cover a baking sheet with baking paper. Ideally, you should use two baking sheets, so you can increase productivity and already have the next round ready to put in the oven when the first is done.

Step 2

With your mixer or kitchen robot, mix the butter until smooth, then add the sugars and vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time, until everything is smooth.

Step 3

Mix the flour with the baking soda and salt. Add it to the eggs batter and mix at low speed. Add the chocolate chips and mix shortly, just until everything is well incorporated. Leave the dough for 30 min in the fridge.

Step 4

Make small round balls of dough, depending on how big you want the cookies and press them slightly, to be flat but round. You don’t want to bother making them too flat because they will end up flat anyway as the butter melts. Make sure you leave enough space in between the cookies. Bake them for 15 minutes. This is a recipe that requires adjustments, so you’ll see how the first round goes and then adjust the size, space in between and total baking time.

I make around 25 medium large cookies from this quantity of dough.