a tale of two cookies

It was the best of nights, it was the worst of nights, it was a night of wisdom, it was a night of foolishness, it was a night for baking cookies from premade store-bought dough, it was a night for baking cookies from scratch.

This week I wanted to prove to myself that I could take on a baking project completely from scratch. I also wanted to be able to measure my from-scratch cookies against ones that came from a mix, as kind of a mark of my progress so far. I settled on baking chocolate chip cookies, using the classic Nestle Tollhouse recipe from the back of the chocolate chip package and baking them alongside the premade cookie dough that comes in a tube. As you’ll read, the results were mixed.

The Nestle Tollhouse recipe calls for flour to be mixed with some salt and baking soda (remember how I bought baking powder by mistake?) and then set aside while two sticks of softened butter are creamed with both white and brown sugar. For the second week in a row, I forgot to leave my butter out to soften it, so I tried to do so at the last minute by letting it hang out on top of the stove while the oven preheated. Not so successful.

This is also one of the problems with trying to bake on a weeknight – not a lot of margin for error with timing. The butter had softened slightly, but not really enough, so when I started to beat the sugar and butter together, butter was flying everywhere. I’ve mentioned that I pride myself on keeping a clean kitchen, so tonight was a night that those OCD tendencies were put to the test a little bit.

Once I got the butter and sugar nice and creamy together, I added two eggs, one at a time and beat them into the butter. While cracking the second egg, a little piece of shell went into the butter mixture and I had to fish it out. I’m really praying that’s the only piece of shell that found its way into the mixture. I looked for any more pieces for a good few minutes before I was satisfied the rest of the batter was shell-free. If it’s one thing I really can’t stand is an unexpected unpleasant surprise in a baked good. It’s one of many traits I inherited from my maternal grandfather, Guido, along with a love of shoes and thick hair that responds to no amount of product or taming.

After the eggs were incorporated into the mixture, it was time to slowly beat in the flour, which was fun, as plumes of flour flew out of the bowl each time I turned on the beater. Even without butter going everywhere, my kitchen got pretty wrecked tonight.

Even before the mixer got started, the kitchen was getting a little wrecked.

After the dough was set, I mixed in the chocolate chips and the nuts. I don’t tend to love nuts in my cookies, but I’m also not strongly opposed to them, so I decided to follow the advice of the Tollhouse experts and leave the nuts in. I chose walnuts and decided to chop them very finely to avoid having them competing with the chocolate chips for attention in each of the cookies.

Now it was time to crack open the tube of dough and start spooning out cookie dough. I made up one baking sheet with the premade dough and one with my dough, set it in the oven for ten minutes and started cleaning up. I checked the cookies at nine minutes and thought they didn’t quite look done yet. As I continued cleaning, I remembered they would continue to cool for a couple minutes still on the baking sheet, so they might finish baking on the actual sheet. I worried that leaving them in the oven would result in them possibly baking for too long. As I fretted over whether or not to pull the cookies a minute early, the buzzer went off. I pulled the cookies out right away and realized that they were totally fine. As I tested one cookie on each side for doneness, I saw that both were nearly completely uncooked and mushy in the center of each cookie. I left them  both on their sheets for two minutes, and when I had come back, they were all done and ready to go. The cookies that came from the premade dough looked like they had just come out of a box of Freihofer’s., but my homemade batch were all much bigger and thicker. I couldn’t wait until they cooled so I could try one of each. (Anyone who actually knows me knows that this last statement is a complete lie and that the second the cookies were cool enough to touch with my hands, they were cool enough to sample. But you’ll have to wait for Saturday for the results of the taste test!)

After the baking sheets were free, I put together a second sheet of cookies for both premade and homemade doughs and popped those into the oven. What I was noticing as the cookies cooled and I stored them away was that most of the premade-dough cookies were coming out crispy and burnt, while my homemade ones were not burnt on the bottom. The same thing held true for the second batch of cookies as well. I have to say that I’m a little embarrassed that it was easier for me to bake my homemade cookies than it was to bake cookies from a tube.

Tonight was truly a tale of two cookies: pretty premade dough cookies that burnt to a crisp and more rustic homemade ones that turned out looking pretty fluffy and chewy. We had a messy kitchen and some nasty burnt cookies, but a recipe that went off pretty much without a hitch.

Thanks for reading! As always, feel free to take it to the comments.

- Jon