Alton Brown's The Puffy

I already have a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. It's this. But Aaron's friends Jeff and Leon requested super-soft chocolate chip cookies for their birthday party, and that recipe is crispy-chewy, not super-soft.

I remembered watching an episode of Good Eats where Alton played with chocolate chip cookie techniques and ingredients to create different styles of cookie. I easily tracked down the recipe and made them.

Commenters on the recipe at the Food Network site complained of two main things: the cookies aren't actually puffy, and they're too sweet. I found the first to be very true. They weren't puffy at all. They were soft, though, so I successfully fulfilled the birthday request. As to the second complaint, I often think baked goods are too sweet. These cookies weren't. They had a nice saltiness to balance out the sweetness. It probably helped that I always use a fairly dark semi-sweet chocolate chip (Guittard in the bulk bin).

I still prefer the crispy-chewy chocolate chip cookies I found on Smitten Kitchen last year, but The Puffy is a good alternative for folks who like a softer cookie.