Chocolate Chip Cookies

The fear of electrocution finally became too great. I decided to buy a new electric hand whisk as my current one requires me to jam a knife in the top to start it (do not tell The Thew that is what I have been doing). Not the greatest way to start a baking project. I hate shopping but took myself along to John Lewis where the cheapest, and lightest, hand whisk wasn't available (why is it on the shelf then?!) but one 2 ½ times more expensive and about eight times as heavy was. I left. I mean who (Kenwood) makes a really heavy hand whisk? Yes it was very pretty but I have to hold the thing and cream butter and sugar together. Luckily my local Tesco had a nice cheap and light hand whisk so I was saved from electrocution. 

I decided to celebrate by finding a recipe that required a lot if whisking. However while looking for this I found my chocolate chip cookie recipe I thought I had lost. It’s brilliant and simple, making a crunchy, yet chewy, cookie. You can freeze it and cook from frozen as well as make giant cookies if you have a pizza pan to bake it in. The recipe makes a lot of dough but that was fine by me as I had need of a lot of baked goods. I’m on film shoots (not as glamorous as it sounds) all this week and I like to bring baked goods with me. I’m bad with names and faces and on shoots I meet so many new people, forget all their names and rely on being the provider of tasty treats to smooth things over.

Apologies for not converting into grams. It’s based on a US recipe and there is something about using cups and basically shoving all the ingredients in together that is so wonderfully easy that I think the experience should be preserved. I also realised, while typing this up, that I used baking powder, not bicarb, which explains why they didn’t come out chewy. They still taste good so have added an option here to pretend that I meant to do it. 

Ingredients

1 ½ cups of butter at room temperature (important!)

1 ¼ cups of granulated sugar

1 ¼ cups of soft dark brown sugar, firmly packed (if you have light then fine but the dark given them a caramel edge)

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

4 cups of flour

2 tsp bicarb of soda (or 2 tsp baking powder if you want them crisper and more biscuit like)

1 tsp salt

300g chocolate chips (whatever you like best – I did a mix of dark and milk) 

1.    Preheat the oven to 180°C/GM 4.

2.    Put the butter, both sugars, vanilla and eggs in a big bowl. Whisk together. This is why room temperature butter is important as you need it soft otherwise dough will start flying.

3.    Stir the bicarb of soda and salt into the flour.

4.    Alternate adding the flour mixture and chocolate chips until it’s all used up (do about thirds).

5.    Take a rounded tsp of mixture and roll into a ball. Do this for all the mixture – yes it takes a while but watch something on TV.

6.    Cook what you want for 9-12 minutes on a cookie tray and freeze the rest in bags. They cook from frozen in about 18 minutes.  

Makes about 60-80!