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The Great American Cookie Quest

Now, we haven't been the most successful in making a good cookie in our house.




I had an old recipe that I thought worked perfectly to get a good crunchy cookie with a chewy centre.


However, when we last made them they ended up being a disaster. We were a bit 'gun ho' with the recipe (that basically means we didn't follow it properly!) and have learnt from our mistakes. We didn't have any chocolate chips, so we broke up a bar of chocolate. However our chucks were too big, we put too much chocolate in, and our cookie mixture wasn't floury enough, so they just kind of disintegrated on the baking tray when baked. Whoops! Think floppy brandy snaps with chocolate chunks in. Despite looking awful, they were delicious, and we cut cookie shapes out of the congealed mixture with a cutter, but they weren't the cookies of our dreams.


Whoops!

So we thought we'd try again with another recipe. Miss L liked the look of this one from Cookies and Cups and set to work. Again, it wasn't quite the recipe I would have used. I wanted a huge American cookie that is fluffy and chewy. You know the ones. Think Millie's Cookies. This recipe came out more like a Maryland Cookie biscuit. I basically need the recipe with just the right amount of butter to flour so that they spread nicely on the baking tray when baked.


Don't get me wrong, they were delicious, but again we didn't nail the recipe.

For starters, we made our dough balls too small on our first batch, so they ended up cooking really quickly, in about 6 minutes...rather than the 9 it said on the recipe. They burnt a bit, and were quite dense.


Our second run with the mixture was better because we made the cookies larger, and flattened them down to spread them out a bit. This time they were done within 8-9 minutes and were fine. I kept checking them when cooking, so they didn't over cook and burn. Overall, it was a valiant attempt, but I think we can do better. Third time lucky, eh?


If you like a thicker cookie, then why not give the recipe here a go. Like I said, the original recipe is from Cookies and Cups, but I've adapted it here for metric measurements.






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