I took up baking as a hobby about two years ago and to my dad's dismay, it's one of my favourite things to do despite the messy kitchen I leave behind me. I'm a perfectionist so of course my approach to baking was to master one thing at a time starting with the basics. The perfect chocolate chip cookie. I would like to meet anyone who would disagree that the subway cookie is the most mouth watering, delectably chewy, soft and tasty cookie out there so these were obviously my credentials when it came to creating a cookie recipe. This recipe evolved completely by accident when I couldn't be bothered to look up a recipe and then decided to just wing it and low and behold, the cookies turned out great! So below is my method for the best choc chip cookies.
¾ cup of caster sugar
½ cup of brown sugar
130g of butter
1 egg
1 1/2 cup of plain flour
1 tsp Vanilla essence
Pinch of salt
Pinch of baking soda
200g of dark chocolate
1. Preheat oven to 180 °C. Prepare a baking tray with parchment paper
2. Start by combining the sugars and butter together in a mixing bowl. For this batch I browned the butter prior to adding it to the sugar (in order to be fancy) however I couldn't taste much of a difference between browned butter and when I use softened butter. *(Check the end for tips on how to brown butter). Cream butter and sugars together using an electric mixer for 5 minutes and resist the urge to stick your finger in the sloppy bowl of heaven.
3. Add the egg and vanilla essence to this pot of gold and mix until combined.
4. Add the salt, baking powder and flower to the mixture. Combine flour slowly ⅓ of a cup at a time. Remember the cookie dough should form a shaggy dough not super wet and sticky. Do not over mix the dough as this will lead to tougher cookies. Just mix in the flour until almost combined.
5. Chop up chocolate into uneven chunks (makes for meltier chocolate cookies) and fold gently into the dough.
6. Wrap the cookie dough in a glad wrap and place it in the fridge for a minimum 1 hour. The longer you leave it refrigerated the better your cookies will taste!
7. Remove dough from the fridge and place a teaspoon of dough roughly 3cm apart from the baking tray. Make sure to flatten down the cookies as because we used baking powder they wont naturally deflate
Place in the 180°C oven for 10-15 minutes. Remember your cookies should ALWAYS BE UNDERCOOKED as they continue cooking when you remove them from the oven and harden as they cool.
*If you do want to give browning the butter a go just add the butter to a pot and melt it over low heat until the milk solids float to the top (they should look a bit white and foamy). These will then disappear to the bottom of the pot and then cook for remaining 1-2 minutes stirring CONSTANTLY making sure not to burn the butter.