Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate Chip Cookies
by Jessica Louise

Makes 30 cookies.

Ingredients

6 oz. butter (or 3/4 cup or 1 1/2 sticks)
3.5 oz. granulated sugar (or 1/2 cup)
5.25 oz. brown sugar (or approx. 3/4 cup)
10 oz. all-purpose flour (or approx. 2 cups)
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt*
1 egg
1 egg yolk**
1 tbsp. vanilla
6 oz. chocolate chips (half a bag)***

*I use non-iodized, fine sea salt.
**Approximately 2.35 oz. of egg, total.
***Quality matters. A lot. I use Ghirardelli semi-sweet or 60%.

Steps

1. Put the butter in a pan to brown. For tips, try this or this. 
2. Keeping an eye on the butter, combine the sugars in a large mixing bowl. Once the butter is browned, pour it into the sugars and stir to combine.
3. In a separate, medium mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
4. Once the sugar and butter mixture is no longer hot to the touch (warm is OK), add the egg, egg yolk, and vanilla. Stir well to combine.
5. Add the flour mixture to the sugar-butter-egg mixture and stir well to incorporate all the flour. 
6. Add the chocolate chips and knead with your hands in the bowl to evenly distribute the chips throughout the batter. It will seem like the chocolate chips don't want to stick in the batter, but that's OK.
7. Heat the oven to 350° F. Put the dough in the freezer while the oven heats up. Now is a good time to clean up. 
8. Once the oven is heated, portion the dough (using a #40 portioner, or a tablespoon, generously rounded) onto parchment-lined baking sheets. You should be able to fit 15 cookies on a standard half-sheet pan. 
9. Bake for 12 minutes, turning the baking sheet half-way through. Remove from the oven when the edges have just started to brown, let them rest on the sheet for a minute, and transfer to a wire rack to cool.
10. Once cool, store in an open plastic zip bag or in a glass or plastic container with the lid only resting lightly on top. You don't want to leave them completely exposed to the air, but having them in an air-tight container ruins the texture, too. 

Kouign amann

Kouign amann (pronounced something like "keen ahMAH") is a simple laminated dough. Basically, you enclose butter in dough, then fold it and roll it out and repeat a bunch of times so you have lots of fat-dough-fat-dough layers. This one has 27 layers, which sounds like a lot, but I only had to do three folds, or "turns." Croissants, puff pastry, and danishes are all laminated doughs. Kouign amann is similar to a croissant, but with the addition of sugar.

This turned out pretty well for being my first attempt at laminating. I ended up with a higher fat to dough ratio than intended because I messed up the enclosing-the-butter part, but I don't think that had a huge impact on the final product.

It smelled amazing while it was baking because the sugar sprinkled on top was caramelizing. I ate way too much of it. And I made two. My co-workers will thank/resent me for bringing the rest in tomorrow.

The recipe I used came from Joe Pastry, which may be my very favorite baking site. His kouign amann looks a lot better than mine, as it should.

Boston Cream Pie

This is my Boston cream pie. I thought it failed. But letting it sit longer makes a huge difference in the quality because the pastry cream gets a chance to soak into the sponge-y cake. It was delicious.

I used Greg Patent's recipe from Origins (found online here) because he dedicated a lot of time to tracking down the true cake.

While I sincerely appreciate and value authenticity, I think baking is a place where tinkering and change are totally acceptable. Next time, I'll skip the almonds (they got soggy from the pastry cream that glues them to the side of the cake). I'll also mess with the chocolate topping (a simple mixture of chocolate and cream) because it turned out chewy, almost rubbery. I'll up the ratio of rum to water (brushed onto the cake layers before assembling) because I couldn't taste it at all in the final product. But the cake and the pastry cream were just right.

Pastry cream might be my favorite substance. I was happy to find that this recipe left me with more than a cup extra.

Working on chocolate chip cookies

Crunchy on the outside, chewy in the middle. And this was not right out of the oven. Almost perfect.

I figured out snickerdoodles. Now it's time for chocolate chip cookies.

The photo above is of my second attempt. The first attempt turned out weird (see the problems listed below) but pretty. The second attempt is very nearly perfect. They'd be better with a better chocolate, but I couldn't find Ghirardelli 60% at the co-op.

I'll gather feedback tonight at a party. And make them again in the middle of the week when I have my co-workers over for a Wii party. But they're pretty close to perfect.

General Baking Tips

I know that a little bit of magic is responsible for my cookies turning out as well as they do. Or maybe you could call it "love." But there are some practical things I do that many home bakers don't do, and these things make for a better cookie:

1. Weigh ingredients. Especially flour and eggs. A cup of flour is 5 oz. One large egg (cracked) is 1.75 oz.
2. Rotate the baking pan half-way through. 
3. Do not over-bake. It takes some practice to know when to take cookies out of the oven. When in doubt, err on the side of too soon. An under-baked cookie tastes way better than an over-baked one (most of the time).
4. Taste nuts, especially walnuts, before adding them to the batter. Rancid walnuts are gross and are probably a big part of why kids (and adults) think they don't like nuts in cookies. I get mine in bulk at the co-op and store them in the fridge.
5. Always toast nuts before adding them to the batter. So much more flavor that way.
6. Use parchment paper. Then you don't have to deal with greasing cookie sheets or scraping ruined cookies off the pan. I save the used parchment paper and use it again on similar-smelling cookies.
7. Use good butter (like Hope Creamery). And please don't use Crisco. 
8. Use good chocolate. The best chocolate chips I have found are Ghirardelli 60%. And I've tried a lot of chocolate chips. 
9. Use an oven thermometer. Seriously.
10. Enjoy it.

I'll probably think of more. And maybe I'll write little posts explaining why each of these things is important. 

Conversions

This post is mostly for my own reference, since I'm sick of looking this stuff up everything I mess with a recipe. Basically, volume measurements are unreliable. I want to be able to reproduce my recipes nearly exactly, so I convert volume measurements to weight instead. I'll be adding to this.

Ingredient	Volume	Weight
All-purpose flour	1 cup	5 oz
Granulated sugar	1 cup	7 oz
Brown sugar, packed	1 cup	7 oz
Egg, large, whole	1 egg	1.75 oz
Egg, large, white	1 egg white	1.05 oz
Egg, large, yolk	1 egg yolk	0.6 oz

Green tea cake

Some friends are having a Japanese-themed birthday party and asked me to bake a cake. No further instruction or suggestion beyond "awesome." So, I'm making green tea cake. I practiced today so I don't bring something inedible to the party.

Recipe attempt #1
Loosely adapted from Cook's Illustrated's fluffy yellow layer cake recipe.
10.9 oz. cake flour
3 Tbsp corn starch
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
4 Tb powdered buttermilk
4 tsp matcha
1 3/4 cups sugar
10 Tb butter, melted and cooled a bit
1 cup water, lukewarm
3 Tb vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla
6 egg yolks (about 3.75 oz)
3 egg whites (about 3.15 oz)

Preheat oven to 350° F. Prepare two nine-inch round cake pans by greasing the bottoms and sides, cutting a round of parchment paper for the bottoms, greasing the paper, and flouring the inside of the pans.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, powdered buttermilk, matcha and 1 1/2 cups of the sugar in a large bowl. Set aside.

Combine butter, water, oil, vanilla, and egg yolks in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Whip the egg whites in a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment until foamy. Gradually add the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar, then whip until the whites hold a stiff peak. Transfer the whites to a bowl.

Without bothering to clean the mixer bowl, dump in the flour mixture. Running the whisk on low, add the butter mixture gradually, then mix until just combined. Scrape the sides and mix until all the flour is incorporated (10-15 seconds).

With a rubber spatula, fold in 1/3 of the egg whites to lighten the mixture. Then carefully fold in the rest of the whites until there are no more streaks of white.

Split the batter between the two prepared cake pans. Tap the pans against the counter to release air bubbles.

Bake about 25 minutes, rotating the pans half way through. Cool in the pans on a rack for 10 minutes, then remove the cake from the pans and cool on rack completely.

Frosting

I used Cook's Illustrated's creamy vanilla frosting, plus a teaspoon of matcha.


Problems

I think I over-beat the egg whites a bit, which made them difficult to fold in. But it doesn't seem like this had an impact on the texture of the cake.

I might up the amount of matcha. The batter was a lovely green, but it didn't taste much like green tea. After tasting the actual cake, I think I'll add a teaspoon more.

The side/bottom of the cake is a tiny bit crunchy. I think it will soften after sitting frosted a while, though. I baked the cake for a full 25 minutes. Next time, just 23.

I halved the recipe to just make half a cake (cut it in half and stuck one half on top the other). I also halved the frosting, but it wasn't enough. I'm a bit worried about making this frosting, which CI published alongside a cupcake recipe, since it might not cover. Haven't decided yet what I'm going to do about that.