Can You Bake That Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies?
from Author
Have you ever looked at all of those perfect pictures that show those flawless plates of chocolate chip cookies on the covers of magazines or in recipe books and eagerly went home to try your hand at producing a similar result? If you are like most people, then the answer is yes. Yet if you are like most, then you were also likely disappointed at the lack of perfection your own batch showed.
If you have ever experienced that, then you can be comforted to know you are not alone, not by a long shot. The fact is that those are staged pictures and there were probably only a dozen cookies chosen for the picture out of hundreds that were made for the photo shoot. Nobody in their home kitchen can compete with that, in addition to the skills and talents of well paid food stylists whose job it is to make everything look delectable.
However, it is important to keep in mind that it does not matter as much about how cookies look, especially when you are comparing them to professional photographs, but how good those chocolate chip cookies taste to the recipient, or to the cook herself. Add great taste to a loving heart and kind hands that prepared them and the scintillating aroma of them baking in the kitchen will be what is remembered long after they have been gobbled up.
And, the same is most likely true of anyone you share those cookies with. If you baked them with love and shared them with friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members, then the cookies filled with dark chocolate chips, or white chocolate chips for that matter, will no doubt be a hit, of course barring any major wrong turns when following the recipe.
Are you hoping to have every batch of cookies made with chocolate chips come turn out to be wonderfully soft and chewy? If so, then you are like most people and the good news is that making the perfect chocolate chip cookie really is fairly simple and not that hard, especially if you let go of the expectation that each one will look like it belongs on a magazine cover or tucked into gourmet gift baskets. The trick is simply to have a good recipe in hand and to follow it as closely as possible.
One problem with some recipes for cookies made with chocolate chips is that they instruct the baker to drop a spoonful of batter onto the cookie sheet and then put them into the oven until they appear to be a nice golden brown. Unfortunately, that advice is all wrong and by the time you see the top of the cookies turning brown the bottoms have already gotten overcooked and are dark brown or even burned. From that point of being over-baked, when you let them cool they will end up getting hard and becoming more like jaw breakers than the handmade chocolates treat you intended for them to be.
There is a simple remedy to this problem, and that is to simply remove the cookies about two minutes earlier than what most common recipes for chocolate chip cookies suggests. It could be that you’ll need to run some of your own tests to figure out the exact balance of oven time and the size of the cookie, but if you experiment, write down your results and exercise patience, then there is no doubt you will be whipping up batch after batch of delicious cookies that people will love.