Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today I made another great recipe from Lovin From the Oven, her Grandma's Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies (I cut her recipe in 1/4th since it makes an obscene amount of cookies).

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 and 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
15 oz dark chocolate chips
3 oz white chocolate chips
3 oz milk chocolate chips

Directions: Combine butter, shortening, sugars, eggs, and vanilla until well mixed. Separately mix flour, baking soda, and salt and add to butter-sugar mixture until mixed. Add chocolate chips. Drop in spoonfuls on cookie sheet, bake at 375 for 11 minutes or until lightly brown.
The recipe claims to make 3 dozen, although I've found it makes about 4 dozen (unless you like your cookies giant).

You might notice that this looks almost exactly like the Nestle Tollhouse Recipe. In fact, there are only two differences: 1) subbing out half the butter for shortening, and 2) using different varieties, and a larger total amount, of chocolate chips. Shortening is apparently really ridiculously bad for you (something or other about trans fats...psh) but I think it makes cookies so excellent, because it has a higher melting point than butter or margarine, so the cookies don't spread out very much! They stay nice and fat, just the way I like them :P I also like my cookies loaded with chips, but if you don't, you could cut that down a little.

Coconut Chocolate Cookie

I like chocolate. I like coconut. I like cookies. So I combined them, and the result was very well-received. I mostly just modified a standard cookie recipe by adding flaked coconut and chocolate chips. I made some cookies without the chocolate chips because I thought there was too much chocolate, but my roommate's boyfriend convinced me that there's really no such things as too much chocolate. Sorry about the coldness of the picture though; I haven't quite worked out how to take good food pictures with my new camera.

Ingredients
1.25 cups sifted flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup melted butter
1/4 cup minus 1 Tbsp white sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1.25 cups unsweetened shredded coconut
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease baking sheet(s).

2. In a small bowl, sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt together.

3. In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until well blended. Beat in the egg, egg yolk and vanilla. Slowly add the dry ingredients until well mixed. With a wooden spoon, mix in the coconut and chocolate chips last.

4. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto baking sheet. Bake for 10-12min. Cool on wire rack.

Pecan Sandies

My grandpa liked the chocolate chip cookies I once made, so I thought for Chinese New Years, I could make him some other cookies he liked. Looking around, I stumbled across some very yummy looking recipes for pecan sandies, and finally settled on using the one from Smitten Kitchen. Let's just say, the result was melt-in-your mouth delicious, and made the whole house smell amazing while baking, to boot. As part of my standard operating procedure, I reduced the amount of sugar - for this recipe, I'm not sure that was the best of ideas. At least if something's not sweet enough, you can always sweeten it by dipping it in chocolate, or spreading some Nutella on before eating! :)

Ingredients

slightly over 1 cup pecans
2 cups flour
1 cup softened butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1. Preheat the oven to 350F. Bake the pecans for about 12min, until they are browned and nutty. They will be delicious at this point, so feel free to bake a few extra to munch on. After they cool, grind the nuts with 1/4 cup of flour in the food processor (depending on the seal of your food processor, it might make a mess, so clear the area around it). Set aside.

2. Cream the butter and sugar together. Stir in the vanilla. Sift together the remaining flour, salt, and baking powder. Add to the wet ingredients until just combined. Stir in the nut mixture. Form the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill until firm, about 2hrs.

3. Preheat the oven to 325F. I cut the dough into four quarters, then rolled each quarter between two sheets of wax paper until they were the thickness I wanted my cookies (it doesn't rise much in the oven). Cut into squares of desired size. The recipe said to not reroll scraps - I'm not sure why, but I just baked them as was and munched on them myself. Maybe that's why?

4. Put on baking sheet with a little space in between (they don't spread, so you don't need that much space in between). Bake at 325F until golden brown, about 12 minutes. Cool on wire rack; repeat for remaining dough.

Chocolate Chip Coookies

In my opinion, you can't beat plain old Nestle TollHouse for chocolate chip cookies! I practically have the recipe memorized. In case you don't here it is -

Ingredients
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 large eggs
2 and 1/4 cups flour
1 12-oz package of chocolate chips

Directions: Cream butter, sugar, and vanilla together. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat well after each egg. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking soda, and salt. Gradually add the dry mixture to the wet mixture. Stir in chocolate chips, drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake at 375 for 9 to 11 minutes. Enjoy with a big glass of milk!

mmmmm chocolate chip cookies :)

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownies, aka Death By Chocolate. No, Seriously.

I stumbled across this idea on Bakerella and decided I just simply had to try it. I did the making it from scratch thing though, using the one bowl brownie recipe from smitten kitchen and Symphony cookie recipe from this very blog! These were a big hit with everyone - I found it incredibly sweet/rich, so I cut them into tiny little 1.5x1.5cm squares, handed people a toothpick, and had them eat it like little brownie/cookie lollipops.

Time: 1:30
Serves: a lot

Ingredients:
Brownie from smitten kitchen, minus 1/2 stick butter
Cookie from Epicurean Adventures

Ganache:
12oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
slightly less than 3/4 cup heavy cream
6Tbsp butter

1. Make the cookie dough recipe according to OhmsAndFarads's recipe on Epicurean Adventures.
2. Make the brownie batter according to the recipe on smitten kitchen. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9x13 pan. Pour the brownie batter into the pan. Drop spoonfuls of the cookie dough into the batter, pressing lightly to level it. Bake at 350F for 35min, or until a toothpick comes out mostly clean. Let cool.
3. Heat the cream and butter over low flame (don't boil). Pour over the chocolate chips and stir until the chocolate melts. It initially looks like it's seizing up, but just keep stirring and it'll be fine. Spread over the cookie-brownies and let set in the fridge. Cut and enjoy!

I think you can cut down the amount of sugar/butter/eggs that the individual recipes call for. I personally found this super super rich, so next time I think I would only use 2 eggs & 1 cup sugar for the brownie, 1 bar of chocolate for the chocolate chip cookie, and perhaps use half unsweetened and half semi-sweet chocolate for the ganache. It's really up to each baker to determine how they want to adjust recipes to their own tastes though.

Symphony Cookies

These cookies are really easy to make, and they're always a bit hit. Soooo, there are times (like around Christmastime) when I make hundreds of these...


Now, the trick is to use Symphony chocolate bars. Symphony chocolate is incredibly creamy, and far superior to any chocolate chips you'll find. I decided to also try out a few different ingredients: mint chocolate chips from Trader Joe's, mini peanut butter cups also from Trader Joe's, and Cadbury caramellos (chocolate stuffed with caramel mmm):


This recipe is adapted from a Hershey's cookbook we mail ordered many many years ago.

Symphony Cookies (yield: ~50 cookies)
2 Symphony bars (2-4.25oz bars), chopped into chocolate-chip-sized pieces
6 Tbsp. butter
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1/4 c. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 egg
1 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 c. walnuts, chopped

- Preheat oven to 350F.
- Beat together butter, sugars, and vanilla.
- Add egg and beat
- Sift together flour and baking powder in a separate bowl.
- Blend flour mixture into butter mixture
- Stir chocolate and walnuts into into batter
- Drop batter by teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. I usually put about 30 cookies on each sheet, because i keep the cookies pretty small. If you want bigger cookies, try maybe 15-20 cookies on a sheet. Bigger cookies generally taste better because there's more batter (this recipe has a LOT of chocolate chunks), and so the cookies become softer.
- bake for about 10-15 min until the cookies are golden brown. halfway through baking, rotate the sheet(s) for more even cooking.
- transfer cookies to wire rack to cool. for crispier cookies, allow the cookies to cool completely before placing in an airtight container. for chewier cookies, place into an airtight container as soon as they are cool enough to handle.
- best way to enjoy--nuked in the microwave to 15 sec with a tall glass of milk (or a scoop of ice cream!)

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I finished an important, large section of my project at work that had been taking up pretty much all of my time and therefore left work around 4PM on Thursday. As it turns out, going home early? Means I get really bored sitting at home. So I decided to make chocolate chip cookies to bring to lab the next day, as a way to thank everyone who's helped me with my debugging and/or the rants that came with it.

I followed the Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, minus the walnuts. Instead of the Nestle chocolate chips though, I used Guittard because they were on sale at Safeway. Adrienne seems to think they taste better than other chocolate chips - I personally am not well-educated enough in the world of chocolate to tell the difference. (I can pretend to, but don't really, see a difference between Hersheys and Ghirardelli.) In my opinion, there is waaay too much sugar in this recipe and the cookies are way too sweet. However they were a big hit in the lab, so *shrug*

Hazelnut Chocolate Chip Cookies

I like hazelnut. I like chocolate chip. I am stressed. Clearly, this meant inventing a recipe (since I couldn't find one out there). I don't like lots of sugar and butter, so I halved the amount of sugar and butter in the standard chocolate chip cookie recipe. I also didn't have baking soda on hand, so I just substituted baking powder. The cookies turned out neither chewy nor obscenely sweet, with hazelnut and chocolate flavor - exactly the way I like. :P

Time: 0:30
Serves: depends on size of cookies

Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1 cup white sugar (you should do half brown half white if you have brown sugar. I didn't and didn't feel like shopping)
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 heaping or 3 flat teaspoons baking power
3 cups flour
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
2 cups chopped hazelnuts, roasted
1 package instant hazelnut coffee mix

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. With electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until smooth. Add eggs one at a time. Add vanilla, then baking power. Add flour and hazelnut coffee mix. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.
3. Chill in refrigerator for 10 minutes.
4. Drop spoonfuls onto ungreased baking pan. I like doing small spoonfuls so the cookies are bite-sized. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until edges are browned.

Heath Bar cookies

A couple weekends ago (I'm behind in my blogging!), I decided to try another recipe from my favorite baking blog, Lovin' From the Oven. Every recipe I've made from this blog has been FABULOUS (sometime I'll have to post about her Grandma's Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies which were a mega hit at a party I brought them to), so I was really excited to try her Heath Bar Cookies. I love, love, LOVE heath bar, and obviously I love cookies so I thought it would be a good combination. I followed the recipe as is on her blog, substituting 1 cup brown sugar and 1/2 c white sugar instead of 3/4 cup of each (I LOVE brown sugar...I actually like to eat it just by itself, but maybe I shouldn't admit that). Anyway, I even followed her instructions to chill the dough for at least 45 minutes (I actually chilled it overnight) in order to stop the cookies from spreading out too much. Welllllll........despite all that, when I took my cookies out of the oven they were thinner than quarters!
Somehow I must have ended up with too high of a butter:flour ratio, which isn't too surprising since I tend to guestimate with my flour. However, despite the fact that they looked less than perfect, these cookies tasted AMAZING. Seriously. I. COULD. NOT. STOP. EATING. THEM. I mean, I have that problem with most food, but this was out of control. I guess it's not surprising; since when has too much butter ever made anything taste BAD?

Anyway here's the "recipe" I followed -- I'd guess I probably actually used slightly less than 2 c flour, so I'd use that if you like your cookies thin and buttery..if you like them normal, then you could try actually using measuring cups!

1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 bag toffee pieces
4 Heath Bars, chopped

Beat butter and sugars until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, and vanilla. In a small bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt. Gradually add flour mixture to butter mixture. Stir in toffee and Heath pieces. Chill for at least 45 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

Double Chocolate Mint Chip Cookies

Back when I was a little kid, my mom made delicious cookies using a brownie mix and mint chocolate chips. Then, the chocolate companies stopped selling mint chocolate chips (at least in regular grocery stores) and so my mom never made the cookies again. A couple of years ago, I was inspired to try to make them using chopped up Andes Mints instead of mint chocolate chips, and I have been making (and loving!) them that way ever since.

Ingredients:
1 5 oz. package Andes Mints, cut up into relatively chip-sized pieces
1 Brownie mix
1/2 cup all purpose flour
2 eggs
1/3 cup cooking oil

Directions:
Combine all ingredients, adding Mints last, stir until well mixed. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until cookies have just lost their gloss. Be careful not to overbake. Let cool for a couple minutes, remove from cookie sheet, and enjoy with a big glass of milk!