Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

This recipe has become my go to cookie recipe.  Who doesn't like good old fashioned chocolate chip cookies?  They are so comforting and easy to make!

The special ingredient, vanilla pudding mix, keeps the cookies soft and tasting fresh for days.  All the other ingredients are what you would expect; butter, flour, eggs, baking soda, sugar, vanilla and chocolate chips.

The cookie dough comes together really quickly.  I cream the butter and sugar in my standing mixer, add the pudding mix, then eggs and vanilla.  Then hand mix in the flour and chocolate chips.

Using an ice cream scoop, I scoop out equal mounds of dough.  (When these pictures were taken, I wasn't baking in my kitchen, so I improvised with a measuring cup)  I like to use an ice cream scoop or measuring cup as it makes sure all the cookies are an equal size and bake evenly as well.




 I baked them on a parchment sheet for about 8 minutes.  I like to slightly under bake the cookies, so that they have a nice soft chewy center.  I take them out of the oven just before the center looks fully done and leave them on the baking sheet to cool.  They will continue to cook for a bit from the heat of the baking sheet.  I was baking in a convection toaster oven, so it may take longer in a full size oven.

Recipe adapted from allrecipes

Yield: 6 dozen

4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 cups butter, softened

1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

2 (3.4 ounce) packages instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 cups semisweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Sift together the flour and baking soda, set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Beat in the instant pudding mix until blended. Stir in the eggs and vanilla. Blend in the flour mixture. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips and nuts. Drop cookies by rounded spoonfuls onto parchment paper lined cookie sheets.
3. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven.

 

Week 8: Cookies

This week was all about cookies.  I showed up early to class to scale the ingredients, just to find out into the class that my partner wasn't coming, so looks like I'm doing double the work, but that also means double the cookies for me :)

We learned how to make spritz cookies, which are named after the German word spritzen which means to squirt.  The cookie dough is made but then piped(squirted) out of a piping bag.  The dough was pretty basic, a mixture of butter, shortening, icing sugar, flour, vanilla, eggs and lemon zest.






We learned that icing sugar often contains corn starch which helps make whatever you are making, melt in your mouth while preventing it from caking, which is good for this shortbread like cookie.  Also, letting any type of zest sit in sugar before incorporating helps bring out the flavour and oils in the zest.


If I was to make this again, I think I would add more lemon zest or some other flavouring and substitute all butter for the shortening as that gives it a better flavour.






With this dough, we piped it into various different shapes and once finished, decorated with chocolate different ways as well.  We also had the choice of making sandwich cookies with jam in the middle and obviously I decided to make some of those too :)  When I got home, I made some more sandwiches with Nutella, who doesn't love that stuff!