Naturally, when you are at home for days on end but not physically incapacitated, it is necessary to bake a lot of cookies.

So I looked for the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, as I’ve been craving those for a while. And these ones from Thomas Keller seem to be one of the most highly rated recipes you can find online.

As we were planning to play a new board game I got for my birthday today, it seemed like the perfect time to get baking. Because everyone knows you can’t play board games without snacks.

Since I like to experiment a little with recipes I made roughly one third of it as indicated, with 2 different kinds of chocolate with varying percentages of cocoa solids,  another third with bits of salted fudge and mixed salted nuts instead of chocolate, and the last third with ALL THE THINGS.

Notes:

• I do not have a stand mixer, but I do have a hand mixer, so I tried that with the whisk attachments first and barely prevented butter from flying all over the kitchen… I then tried to put the butter and sugar in my food processor with the dough mix.. spinny disc thingy… and ended up having a lump of barely mixed ingredients at one end of the food processor and supermixed ingredients at the bottom. I had to prod it a lot in order to get it properly mixed, and did the last part (mixing in the dry ingredients) by hand with a wooden spoon. This may or may not have affected the final product (I really don’t know what the difference is between making the butter and sugar mixture fluffy vs. just mixing it).
  

  
• I also did not sift out the “chocolate dust”, because 1) I’m lazy and 2) who throws away chocolate??
• Since some of my butter was salted and I also added salted fudge + nuts to some of the cookies, I only added a pinch of salt to the batter. This was plenty.
• My cookies were probably a little bigger than the original recipe, as I made 25, and I believe the recipe should make 32. Hence I let mine stay in the oven for 14-15 minutes rather than the 12 indicated in the recipe and the 1st and 3rd batch are both probably a little overdone, but not burnt and still very tasty. 12 minutes may be sufficient even for the slightly bigger cookies.
• Also, if making the cookies a little bigger, 6 to a sheet is probably enough, as my sheets with 8 or 9 had most cookies bleeding into each other.

Verdict:

Winner: I think the fudge and nuts ones were the best, honestly. But that’s down to personal preference of course. I do have a thing for fudge. Followed by the original recipe, because the everything cookies while good probably had too many different things in them for the individual ingredients to stand out. I think J preferred the fudge and nuts ones too, but I gave him a plate with three halves and asked him after he’d eaten them which were the best, and he was like “the one on the right”. Though of course by that time I didn’t remember which that was.. I guess I’ll have to redo the experiment. For science.

General: Pretty good cookies, but not the best I’ve had. I do kind of miss the vanilla, and I’d maybe want them a little thicker, so they’re more soft and gooey in the middle (this could also be accomplished by leaving them in the oven for a shorter time, but I generally like them a bit thicker). I think I’ll try Alton Brown next. Though it will probably be a while, since I have a freezer full of cookies now. 🙂

The board game was also really fun, by the way: Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. Highly recommended. Maybe I’ll do a post on that separately later.