Martha and Me: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Many have seen the autobiographical movie Julie and Julia. Blogger Julie Powell cooked her way through famous chef Julia Childs’ cook book and decided to blog about her adventures while doing so. Well this is my story, me and Martha!

For as long as I have remembered I have idolized Martha Stewart. I want to be her! While others spend their time on Facebook, I’m on Martha Stewart’s website. I love looking through her ideas for holidays, her home decorating ideas, crafts and my favorite thing to look through: recipes!

On Martha’s website you can save your favorite ideas in your “collection”, I currently have 20 pages…with 20 items on each page. That’s 400 ideas! One day I plan on making an idea book to keep with me for when I have a family, kids and a home.  But the problem is that I have a lot of recipes saved, but I don’t know if they are good and worthy of being in my book.

So, my mission is to bake my way through this collection, writing about my experience making and baking the recipes and how it ended up tasting.  After baking my desserts, I will then have various people try them and rate them to see if the recipes are good enough to make it into my idea book.  This is it, the adventures of Jessica and Martha!

The recipe:
Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients Makes 24
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons coarse salt
1 1/4 cups (2 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups packed light-brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups milk chocolate chips
8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
Directions

  1. In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
  2. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat butter and sugars on medium-high until light and fluffy, 6 minutes. Reduce speed to medium-low and beat in eggs, one at a time. Beat in vanilla. Mix in flour mixture just until incorporated; fold in chocolate chips and chunks.
  3. Using a 1/4-cup ice-cream scoop or a large spoon, drop dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet (you should have 24) and refrigerate 1 hour. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, with racks in upper and lower thirds. Arrange 6 unbaked cookies, 3 inches apart, on each of two parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake until edges are light golden brown, 17 to 18 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through. Transfer cookies to a wire rack and let cool. Bake remaining dough using new parchment.

At first I was a little worried.  I’m a college kid on a college budget; I do not own a stand mixer.  I decided to attempt mixing by hand. My arm was a little sore but it worked out well.

The butter and sugars creamed well by hand and the flour mixed in good. Once you start to roll the dough the dough balls will be huge, like “Is this OK?” huge!

It is important to refrigerate the cookies for an hour. The impatient part of me did not want to wait but the cookies do get warm while mixing them.

Now here is the tricky part. Use wax paper and only put six on the pan. Sure, you will have to do more baking but the cookies get huge. It’s a little disappointing because when you rotate the pan halfway through the baking the cookies are tall and fluffy, so you think they will be tall and fluffy cookies, but when they are done baking and you take them out and they are flat and thin.

The cookies turn very brown, I was worried that they were burnt but they weren’t.  My educated guess is that due to the amount of sugar in the cookies they just caramelize and make the cookies look darker.

Overall, making these cookies was easy but with a name like the Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie you would think they are amazing, outstanding cookies.  Really, they are just another chocolate chip cookie. The brown sugar really comes through in the taste and I would put more chocolate chips in the cookies next time.  Were they good enough to make it into my book?

I had four people taste the cookies and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5- 1 being the lowest 5 being the highest- on over all taste, texture, appearance, gooey to crunch ratio, and willingness to try making recipe. I also had them make comments on what they would change about the cookie.

Over all taste- 4.5
Texture-4.5
Appearance- 5
Gooey to crunch ratio-3.5
Willingness to try making recipie-5
Suggestions- More brown sugar and more chocolate chips
So is it going to make it into my book? Sure. There are many different types of chocolate chip cookies, and this one is a good flat chocolate chip cookie recipe.

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