Dave decided we shouldn’t go to his family reunion empty handed. I have no clue about the etiquette for this shit, but I tried to talk him out of it. We don’t have time in the evenings during the week, especially the week before we take vacation days. Whatever we bring also has to travel 10 hours with us. Plus, I was certain his sister-in-law, baker extraordinaire, would have it covered. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention that the blondies I took to the reunion last year were the last thing to go.
Anyway, he insisted on making cookies.
I just made Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies for Memorial Day, so I made the fateful suggestion of trying the family recipe my friend posted in the comments on the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie review. A recipe we haven’t tried before. At 10PM the night before we are leaving. When we aren’t packed. And writing this is also a good use of my time, but I digress.
Dave doubled the recipe for a greater yield when he made the dough last night. But tonight, he didn’t so much feel like baking anymore. So he decided to make them massive so he wouldn’t be baking all night. He also didn’t grease the cookie sheets or line them with parchment. I suppose I should’ve kept an eye on the proceedings, but I worked from 8AM until 8:30PM, so I was eating my dinner and staring glassy-eyed at the TV while Dave made these decisions.
Would you like some cookies?
They’re the cookies that eat like a soup! They have a lovely flavor, but they are very flat and delicate, in addition to being stuck to the pan and undercooked. He’s trying to adjust the later batches, so hopefully we will have a yield greater than zero.
I find this really amusing, probably because Dave is so skilled at cooking while I’m just not. So I’m happy I can feel superior about baking.
My apologies to Erin’s husband’s family for desecrating their childhood cookie.
The instruction “cook until done” left a lot of room for interpretation.
so I took it in a kind of not-fully-cooked direction.
Calling fried food “lightly fried” is all the rage now. You could start a “lightly baked” cookie trend. I just finished my dough disk, I mean cookie, and it was delicious! They taste like toffee.
Sorry! I was worried that you made Elaine’s cookies and that I was at fault. Glad I’m off the hook!
Erin
No, I want to try Elaine’s cookies too, but I worried they’d be shards by the time we got through the long drive.
Think this was predominantly user error! Although, I am wondering what May’s cookies are supposed to be like? How big does she make them? Dave used a 3 tablespoon ice cream scoop and that seemed excessive.
Hey Erin…just had a thought…did May develop this recipe in Colorado? Do you think this could be an altitude baking issue? Dave made smaller cookies with the remaining dough and baked the crap out of them and those batches are quite good.
Hi, this is May of the Robertson chocolate chip cookies. To give some background to this cookie recipe: my mom made chocolate chip cookies in Baltimore that were thin, lacy, and you could see through. She used the recipe on the back of the Nestle chip bag. Years later, in Colorado, the recipe would never work. I also tried it in California (at sea-level), and it didn’t work there, either. The cookies in both places came out thicker and more cake-y. I tweaked it a bit in California (reduced the flour, increased the sugars, reduced the eggs to 1 instead of 2), and the recipe worked beautifully – just like I remember them from when I was a little girl.
But now I’m back in Colorado and the recipe isn’t working as perfectly – it is ok – the cookies are delicate and fairly thin, just not as thin and lacy as I would like.
Here are some things I’m considering: I’ve made florentine cookies (aka lace cookies) which are thin, delicate cookies that you can see through. Oftentimes, florentines call for almond meal (almond flour) or ground oats in addition to part regular flour. Since the almond meal (or oats) doesn’t bind the dough as much as a gluten-rich flour does, it allows the cookie to become flatter and more lacy. I suppose using pastry (cake) flour instead of AP flour may also help. Cake flour has about 9% protein and AP flour has about 11 or 12%. Higher protein = higher gluten which will make the cookie tougher and less likely to spread. An experiment I’d like to try is to sub some almond meal or ground oats into the dough for part of the flour.
For the recipe that Erin submitted, I think it’s important to use room temperature ingredients and beat the daylights out of the butter and sugars and egg. However, once the flour is added, it’s important to gently fold it in. You want to try and keep as much air as possible in the dough so it will be sure to rise as much as possible in the oven. Since there is minimal leavening (baking soda) and too little flour to maintain that rising, the cookies will inevitably collapse, which is exactly what you want to happen. I also bake the cookies using room-temp dough.
For portion-size: I use about 1.5 – 2 tablespoons per cookie. On a half-sheet pan, there is room for about 6 cookies. It’s important that you don’t use too much dough because you want the dough to fully spread out before it starts to bake and bind together. If the dough portion is too big, the edges will start to solidify before the spreading fully takes place, especially in such a hot oven. This should not yield a flat cookie.
With regards to baking time: for cookies I usually don’t include a baking time since it’s pretty easy to tell when they are done. Last night I timed them. I baked a couple of pans at 400 for 7.5 minutes (this time could change if you use a hot sheet pan. I was using room temp sheet pans for the 7.5 minutes.). After baking, I let the cookies sit for 2-3 minutes on the hot sheet pan and then take them off to a cooling rack. If you take the hot cookies off right out of the oven, they will smush up accordion-style. If you let them cool completely on the sheet pan, they will be difficult to get off the pan without shattering. Most ovens aren’t exactly on temperature, so it’s tricky to say if that time will work for your oven. I’ve worked for years in restaurant kitchens, and many cooks and chefs won’t put a time on their recipes, because they don’t want someone to pull something out of the oven and say “Well, the recipe said X minutes and it was in for X minutes so therefore it is done.” The recipe or timer doesn’t determine if it’s done – it’s really up to the baker or the cook to make that decision. But 7.5 minutes worked well in my oven (conventional – not convection). The cookies had collapsed and were toffee-colored, also a way to tell if they are ready. Once cool, the cookies are crisp and have no bend to them. They are presently tasting delicious with some Ben and Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream. 🙂
Hope some of this helped or clarified.
Hi May, thanks for stopping by and the detailed clarification! I can tell you are definitely a pastry chef!
Now that I know what they are supposed to be like, I suggest you move to DC, because I think Dave got it right except for making them too big, underbaking them, and chilling the dough first. Because delicate, lacy and thin (and toffee colored) is exactly how Dave’s cookies turned out (Dave even said he felt like he was making chocolate chip tuiles). Dave’s first batch (a la the photo) was a mess of smushed up cookies, as you said. Since we have a chewy cookie bias, I think the smushedness was due to the fact that we always purposely underbake stuff. I also suggested he take them off the sheets right away so they wouldn’t keep baking. The next batches, that he made considerably smaller and baked more and left on the sheet longer, were easier to get off of the cookie sheets and they were actually a huge hit at his family’s reunion. I really liked their rich toffee taste as well.
But Dave’s cookies were not crisp and they definitely had a little bend to them. That doesn’t bother us, but I guess that’s not the intent of these particular cookies. I guess next time, we’d have to bake them longer, use room temp dough and fold the flour in (pretty sure Dave used the mixer for all of the dough prep).
Now I’m excited to try these again, although we need to eat more cookies like we need a hole in the head.
Thanks!