Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate Chip Cookies. Nothing ground-breaking to see here. But it’s the simple things in life that are really special. The smell of the cookies as you take them out of the oven is amazing.

I have made a lot of cookies over the years but I’ve never been fully happy with the results. I took out Anna Olson’s Back to Baking the other night to give it another try. I became a little obsessed with her baking show on Food Network some time ago and bought the book shortly after. The book is fab, but all of the measurements are in cups. I have yet to fully trust baking with cup measurements, mainly because they vary in volume depending where in the world you are. There is a conversion guide in the book but I thought it was too much faff to bother with it. But in my quest to get a cookie recipe I love I gave it a go.

So this recipe is adapted slightly from her Basic Brown Sugar Cookie Dough recipe. I like to roll the dough into a long sausage shape and cut off 1cm slices of cookies to bake regular sized cookies. You can make a large batch of this and freeze the raw dough. To make life easy, cut the slices before you freeze the dough, wrap in baking parchment and put them freezer bag. You can then quickly bake as many or as little cookies as you want.

Use good quality chocolate chips so that they keep their shape while baking. The cornflour is the secret to keep the centre of the cookie soft while the edges are crispy.

Makes 24-36 cookies

Ingredients:

115g unsalted butter, at room temperature
100g light brown sugar
50g caster sugar
1 egg, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
185g plain flour
2 tbsp. cornflour
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
200g chocolate chips – I used 100g of dark & 100g of white chocolate chips

Method:

You can make these by hand or use a stand mixer. Cream the butter and the sugars together until fluffy.
Beat in the egg and the vanilla.
Sieve the flour, cornflour, baking soda and salt into another bowl and mix well together.
Mix the dry ingredients into the butter until completely combined and then do the same with the chips.
Turn the dough out onto some parchment or greaseproof paper and roll into a long sausage shape. Wrap the parchment paper around it and put the dough into the fridge for an hour to chill.
Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan/gas mark 4.
Slice the dough into 1cm slices and place onto a lined baking tray. Allow plenty of space between them as they will spread while baking.
Bake for 10-15 mins until they turn a golden brown at the edges. The length of time they take to cook will depend on how large you make them.
Allow to cool for 5 minutes on tray and then put them on a wire rack to finish cooling.

A idea for a small gift!