Thank you to everyone who has recently sent me chocolate chip cookie recipes. Because I'm all about evidence based research, I'm working my way through them and consequently I'm starting to look like a whale. Because making them means you have to eat them too. But Van Gogh suffered for his art and I'm applying the same sort of rigorous commitment to my chocolate chip cookie quest. And yes - an arse the size of China is a small price to pay for finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
P at The Way I Sew It sent me a recipe which called for Crisco which isn't easily obtainable here, so I went online and had some sent over from USA Foods In Melbourne. It arrived on Thursday so I set about making her recipe on Saturday. You Americans just love to make shit difficult don't you? The recipe called for all purpose flour and baking powder. Why don't you guys just use self raising flour so you don't have to drag out two containers? That's what I did, because I'm lazy. I also couldn't be bothered doing accurate conversions, so instead of the 3/4 of a cup of butter , I chucked in 200 grams. I'm just not up for stuffing butter into a cup and then digging it out again with a spoon. That's just madness. I did chuck in 1 and 3/4 Aussie cups of flour which is about 50 grams more flour but I figured that would cancel out the extra Crisco. And I put in extra chocolate chips , because you can never have too many right? Then I duly plopped tablespoons onto trays. By the way,you guys can't do maths at all, because the recipe said I would be get three dozen cookies and I only got 18.
The first batch of cookies went into the oven ...and came out looking like this...someone on Facebook commented that they looked like they were trying to escape.
The recipe said they would take 8-9 minutes for chewy cookies and 11-13 minutes for crispy cookies. Mine took about 25 minutes. What's up with that ? Its not like time moves slower Down Under. Although I accept that my baseball sized tablespoon plops were probably to blame. And, no wonder my cookies were trying to escape - they were being burned alive- slowly.
Round Two and Three went a little better...although I got distracted by Pinterest and Cupcake Mania on my iPad so some of my cookies got baked for 15 minutes and some were in there for about an hour, so I had all the colours of doneness by the time I was finished.
I must say,that even though Crisco is not actual food per se, (I checked the history of Crisco and I kid you not they used to make candles out of the original incarnation) the cookies were pretty bloody good, and I reckon I can tweak this recipe ( and take a vow of not being distracted by games on my iPad) and if I measure things a little more carefully, maybe this could be the recipe of my dreams. If I can get over the guilt of using Crisco. But I'm not backing off on the extra chocolate chips because that would just be wrong.
Happy Mother's Day to all of you. I spent a fabulous afternoon in The Jungle with my Mum having lunch. Mum's are just awesome aren't they?
