Inspired by my friend and neighbors fantastic baking skills, and another little something ;) I have decided that it is time to build some baking skills of my own. Growing up, I was never really around anyone who baked on a regular basic. In my adult life, I have made brownies, cakes and cookies from a box or pre-made dough a few times and felt very proud of my baking abilities. My husband brought it to my attention that unless I bake something from scratch, it really isn't baking. Patrick is a fantastic cook, and our house is full of all of the fancy cooking and baking utensils that any fine chef or baker could ask for. I of course have never used any of them.
So last night I decided that a good start to my baking adventure would be chocolate chip cookies. I didn't have a secret family recipe to go off of, so I just went on-line and did some research. In my search for the best on-line cookie recipe I came across a 5 star rated recipe on allrecipes.com titled The Best, Big Fat, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie, sounds good to me. I have always felt that when you are baking or cooking anything, one of the main secrets is in buying the right brands of ingredients. My thoughts are, its all about the chocolate chips or chunks when it comes to cookies. I went with a chip, but I'm thinking maybe a chunk would have given the cookie a more home made look and taste. My next research was to see how different brands of chocolate chips were rated in some rating panels and I found out that tollhouse chocolate chips are the least desired. In fact, tasters really disliked the chips. It has got to be really difficult to find a chocolate chip that tasted bad. Out of ten different brands, the number one brand was Trader Joe's brand. I love Trader Joe's, but I was not about to venture out to Trader Joe's on a Saturday for chocolate chips, it's a mad house on the weekends.
So Patrick and I went to our local grocery store, with my recipe in hand, to buy all of the ingredients on my recipe list. I have definitely never shopped for flour before and I found it pretty entertaining when I was looking at all of the different brands of flour trying to decide which would be the best, what do I know about flour, nothing. I decided to go with Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips. I knew to avoid tollhouse, and I have never been a big fan of Hershey's.
After an hour in the grocery store, Patrick and I were finally home and we still had to make dinner. I just wanted to get to baking, but Patrick felt it was important to have dinner first. Well, after we cooked, ate and cleaned up, I was out of energy. I decided that we would wait until morning to bake our cookies. Well about 5 minuets later I changed my mind again as I started to crave a chocolate chip cookie and I had to have one now! Pat thought that it would be best to talk and walk me through the process. He might have been afraid that I was going to burn the house down, or break his fancy mixer.
We gathered all of our ingredients and followed the instructions on our recipe. Pat ran the mixer, Pat cracked the eggs and I started to find myself being in charge of reading, and reading only. So I bumped him aside like a little kid and said " I want to do it" He watched me closely with the mixer, and gave me lots of tips and may have taken over a couple of times. I think that my favorite part was adding the chocolate chips into the batter. After the cookie dough was complete, Patrick took a seat on the couch and let me form the dough with the ice cream scooper, and get the cookies in the oven. I watched them for the entire 15 minuets and I was so excited to see them grow and form into beautiful cookies. I was so proud. I got a little stressed at take out time. Are they ready, would they be to doughy in the center, if I leave them in a minuet longer will they burn and be hard. My recipe said to take them out when the edges are lightly toasted. They looked lightly toasted to me so I took them out.
They had a great homemade look to them, but not as homemade looking as I would have liked, if you know what I mean. Some peoples homemade cookies look so amazing you can taste them before you even put the cookie in your mouth. They are tasty. The edges have a little crunch and they are soft in the center. Much better than pre-made dough, but I still feel like something is missing. That didn't stop me from having cookies for breakfast this morning! Erin, our fantastic, talented, baking neighbor is going to have to be my taste tester. Hopefully she doesn't spit them right out :) I may just have to get my hands on her secret recipe.
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