Ah it's Easter break here in Manila, meaning that the yoga studio is closed, I have four consecutive days off, and I have lots of time to write blog posts! So here's the second one in a week...
I love chocolate chip cookies. I love eating them, I love baking them, I love sharing them, I love pretty much everything about them. Particularly Toll House chocolate chip cookies, except with way more chips than the recipe calls for. Chocolate chip cookie dough is nice, but in my opinion its role on Earth is merely to serve as an adhesive to glue as many chocolate chips together as possible. It's a wonderful substance for enclosing chips in a neat, portable vessel that allows you to enjoy melted chips on the go with a hint of sugar and spice and everything nice and without getting your hands too chocolatey.
In my nomadic life, I've lived in many places, since high school moving on average more than once a year. It's become a tradition of sorts to celebrate settling into a new place by baking cookies. I gather the requisite equipment: a big bowl and a small one, a wooden spoon and a spatula, a cookie sheet or two, a cooling rack, measuring cups, measuring spoons, and an oven thermometer. And the ingredients: flour, salt, baking soda, sugar, brown sugar, vanilla extract, almond extract (my favorite extra ingredient), butter, eggs, and a big ol' bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips. Ideally also Nestle Toll House chocolate chunks, a most wonderful addition to the Toll House product line. Then it's time to go!
I end up making dozens of insanely delicious, highly addictive, exploding-with-chocolate cookies and then I must quickly get them out of my new place or else I will pig out on them incessantly until they are all gone. So now the manager, guards, and maintenance staff of my building, the yoga studio staff, my yoga students, and pretty much everyone else around me has had chocolate chip cookies foisted on them. Fortunately they don't complain. I didn't have a proper kitchen with an oven in my Makati apartment or my first Quezon City apartment, but in my current apartment I have a nice little kitchen with a real oven and it has been wonderful to get back into the habit of making cookies.
A bunch of people have asked for my recipe, which is basically the Toll House recipe but with enough subtle and not-so-subtle changes and tricks that I figured I'd put down here all of my cookie-baking tricks and secrets.
First of all, ingredients. For about 30 big cookies (slightly bigger than Mrs. Field's) or 60 cute little cookies if you want to get the "5 dozen" Nestle says you'll get, follow the recipe on the 12 oz. bag of chips. Here are the amounts I use:
2 and 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter softened to room temperature
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1.5 tsp vanilla extract (official recipe calls for 1 tsp)
1 tsp almond extract (not in official recipe)
2 large eggs
at least 3 cups (18 oz) Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate morsels (recipe calls for 12 oz, my standard is 21 oz and I've gone as high as 24 oz!)
The MOST IMPORTANT ingredient is the chocolate. I am a particular fan of using actual Toll House chips in these cookies, they end up tasting just they way they should. However, probably the best chocolate chip cookies I ever made were ones I made when I thought I had a 12 oz bag of chips in the house, but I actually only had about 1/4 cup of chips. Not wanting to go out to the store, I ransacked the house for every bit of chocolate I had - and being a total chocomaniac I had dark chocolate bars, milk chocolate bars, baking chocolate (sweetened of course), Easter bunnies, all sorts - and I chopped it all up into chips and chunks and made cookies with that big random pile of chocolate. The cookies were amazing, every bite was different due to the roughly six different kinds of chocolate in them. The chocolate dust left over from the chopping got all into the batter so even the batter was chocolatey. Mmmm. But I digress, Nestle Toll House chocolate chips are the best, most dependable way to go. Chips that are too small won't be melty and gooey enough. The Toll House chips are big enough, the chunks are awesome. Another benefit of Toll House is that they're sweet, but not too sweet.
Make sure you get UNSALTED butter, or else leave out the salt called for by the recipe. (Unless you are my friend Amanda who likes salty cookies, then use salted butter and additional salt!) In order to cream the butter and sugar, the butter must be soft and room-temperature. If you forget to let the butter warm up, there are several techniques for quick softening: For my double batches which require two cups of butter, I put two one-cup blocks of Magnolia Gold unsalted butter in a small plastic bowl and nuke them in my wimpy microwave on medium-low for about 1 minute 15 seconds, until the butter is really soft and a little melted butter is just starting to collect in the bottom of the bowl. Also: You can microwave butter sticks in the wrappers (NOT metal foil wrappers!) on high for 10-15 seconds. You can chop it into pats and let it warm naturally. You can take half the pats and nuke them until they're starting to get melty and even a bit runny and then mix them with the cold half. Be careful with the microwaving - if the butter is too warm when you mix up the batter your cookies will be more likely to spread and flatten in the oven (you'll have to refrigerate for a while before baking). If you live in the Philippines and your kitchen is not air-conditioned, you can just leave the butter out while you measure out the rest of the ingredients and it'll probably be soft in a few minutes anyway. A note on margarine: you can use margarine with this recipe but while the cookies will come out edible, they won't be nearly as wonderful. Perhaps another time I'll post my recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies. They are made with margarine and without eggs but they're surprisingly delicious. If you must make cookies with margarine, best to use a recipe that's designed for it.
Microwaving for a few seconds also solves the hardened brown sugar problem. BUT if you have a big bag of lumpy, hardened brown sugar, try to measure/chop out roughly the amount you need and then nuke that for a few seconds to soften it. If you nuke the whole bag, it'll be soft for a few minutes but then go back to being harder than ever.
Be sure to crack your eggs individually into a small bowl before adding them to the batter. Bad eggs are extremely rare, but it's still worth the extra step of cracking it separately so that you don't dump a rotten egg into your creamed sugar-butter-extract mixture - one bad egg doesn't have to spoil the whole batch of cookies!
So when you're ready to go, preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit (189 degrees Celsius). I use an oven thermometer - if you do, you will be astounded to discover how rarely ovens actually heat to the temperature that the dial says! My oven here doesn't have temperatures on the dial at all, the dial goes from 1 to 10 and there's a little chart that gives the degrees in F and C. The oven thermometer is easy.
First, mix up the flour, salt, and baking soda in the small bowl. I don't bother sifting the flour, for fancier baking it's an absolute must but I've made cookies carefully sifting, dipping, and measuring and I've made them just scooping the flour out of the bag, and both techniques create delicious cookies, I don't remember being able to tell the difference when I did some comparison testing a few years ago.
Then, in the big bowl, beat the granulated and brown sugar, the butter, and the extracts together (sniff that measuring spoon before you rinse out the vanilla and almond extracts, mmmm) till you have a creamy, uniform mixture. Add your individually-cracked eggs and mix again until nice and creamy/soupy.
Now it's time to add the flour mixture. You have to do this carefully, if you just dump all the flour into the bowl and mix vigorously you'll end up with yourself and your kitchen covered with flour. I usually mix in the flour in two or three additions, adding some of the flour and then mixing it in almost completely, then repeating the process. The more flour that's in the batter the more challenging it is to mix it all in, be patient. If you stir slowly, after 10 or 20 turns of the spoon most of the flour will start to be incorporated into the mix and then you can pick up the pace to get the batter thoroughly blended. When all the flour has been added, make sure you've got the batter fully uniform before adding the chips - it's really difficult to smooth out flour lumps once the chips are in.
Final step is to add the chips. Dump 'em in and stir, if you have a small bowl it may be a challenge to keep from losing the chips too, even though they're much easier to control than the flour. Mix it up good and try not to eat all the cookie dough while it's raw! I must say, however, one of my favorite things about baking chocolate chip cookies is eating the raw cookie dough - much to the chagrin of my yaya Lola when I was a kid, she was always warning of the threat of the dreaded LBM (Westerners, you'll probably have to look that one up).
Now it's time to put the dough on the cookie sheet. Don't bother with those air-filled cookie sheets, they must be useful for other baking applications but I find that they just result in undercooked cookie bottoms - and if you soak them in water when cleaning up, water tends to get inside them and ruin them. No need to grease the cookie sheet either, there's so much butter in the dough that the cookies basically grease the sheet themselves as they cook. If you're using an old cookie sheet with crusty stains on it, you may choose to put a layer of aluminum foil down so the cookies don't stick to (or - ew - soak up) the crusty crud burned onto the pan. A "rounded" spoonful is one where there's at least as much dough piled out of the spoon as there is inside. So a "rounded" teaspoon is more like two or two-and-a-half teaspoons, same idea for a "rounded" tablespoon. Rounded tablespoons will make roughly Mrs. Field's-sized cookies and rounded teaspoons will make cute little cookies. If you make a lot of cookies, consider investing in a mini ice cream scoop to portion out the dough. Whatever size you choose to make, leave enough room between cookies on the sheet so that the diameter of the cookies can double while cooking. And before putting the cookies in the oven, wet your fingers with water to keep the dough from sticking to them and push them down so that the cookie dough lumps are no more than about half an inch (or a little more, maybe 1.5 centimeters) high. This will ensure that they can cook through without the edges and bottoms burning.
I find that if the oven is exactly 375F, 9 minutes and 35 seconds is the ideal amount of time to bake them. Maybe a minute longer for bigger, thicker Mrs. Field's-sized cookies. The cookies will look a little bit underdone when you pull them out of the oven. They will continue to cook and brown for a bit on the sheet when you've taken it out of the oven. Leave them on the sheet for about 1 minute, then use a spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack. (If you don't have a cooling rack, just move them to plates or the countertop or some other non-375-degree surface to cool, but the air circulating around the rack definitely helps.) Ideally you will be using two cookie sheets so you can load up sheet 2 while sheet 1 is in the oven, then by the time sheet 2 is done you'll have been able to load up sheet 1 again. But cool the sheets completely before dropping fresh dough on them - I like to put a few ice cubes on a hot cookie sheet and rub them around to cool the sheet, then wipe off the water and whatever small bits of cookie residue were left on the sheet after removing the cookies with a dishcloth or paper towel. (If you add dough to a hot cookie sheet, the dough will melt and bleed out at the edges but without rising because of the lack of oven heat coming from all sides, so your cookies will have kind of deflated edges.)
Warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies + cold milk = bliss.
So that's pretty much it. Credit to Lola, Mom, Betsy, Dreux, Amanda, Jeanie, Christine, Meridith, Hilary, and Eric for helping me hone these techniques over the years, pretty much all of these tricks I've learned from y'all!
Warmly,
Carol
I've been in my new apartment, aka Kinky's apartment, for about five months now … about time I shared some pictures! The other day I got the place all spruced up and organized and took some photos. Kinky managed to insert herself into almost all of them, it's almost as though she was engaging in digital territorial marking. She does tend to follow me around as I go about, so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. She tends to be very affected by music, she gets really mellow when I put on jazz like Billie Holiday and turns into a hyper attack cat when I play hard stuff like Jane's Addiction or Guns N' Roses. Apparently Jimi Hendrix is “follow Carol around and pose adorably for her photos” music. The shot above was early in the shooting and seems to capture the “this is my kingdom (queendom?) and how charming of you to drop by to pay obeisance to me” vibe that cats so instinctively exude. Note the elegant, relaxed sprawl, the regal tilt of her chin, and the disinterested sneer, accented by the dramatic, alert ears and powerful paws with claws ready for unsheathing at a moment's notice. Kinky my dear, you really know how to own a countertop. Thank you for allowing me to share your pad with you.
Kinky eats her dinner and watches me bake cookies and do other cooking in the kitchen here. A major step up from the other two kitchens I've had here in Manila, it has a full-sized fridge, a nice big double-welled sink, and a real oven (thus the ability to bake all those cookies, and empanadas). It even has a clothes washer, this strange plastic double-tubbed thing, but no dryer so for me the washer serves as a countertop. The major challenge in the kitchen is that there is not one single drawer. Who designs a kitchen with no drawers?!? So I have a lot of hooks on the wall holding strainers, potholders, tongs, etc., and a lot of stuff on the countertops and in cupboards that I would normally put in drawers. Outside the windows is the roof of the downstairs unit, which extends further out than my unit. Birds like to hang out on the roof there.
The picture above is of the entry door and the bathroom door; on the right is what you see as you walk into the apartment (except that Kinky is usually hanging out by the door looking to snoop around the hallway or get picked up, not sitting on the island/table/counter). The TV is part of the unit furnishings. For someone who watches no TV and movies pretty seldom, I have two of the nicest home theater setups I could imagine in a place this small – one in the living room here and the other in the master bedroom.
In the corner with rather sparsely-decorated walls is the couch. Kinky likes to chill out there listening to music. Here she is the mellowest I've ever seen her – Jerry Garcia Band turns her into molasses!
Before we head upstairs, here's the bathroom. One of Kinky's favorite hangout spots is on the mat in front of the shower. The pink towel is mine, the purple one (which gets a lot of use) is Kinky's – I turn on the water for her and she runs into the shower and either drinks the water or uses the facilities – either of which ends up with her pretty soaked. She's been a shower-playing cat pretty much since she could walk, and when I took her to the vet at a few weeks old for her first vaccination the vet sternly said, “don't give her a bath until she's at least 3 months old.” Oh well, she'd already had dozens by that time and showed no sign of stopping. In my defense, I never give her a bath – she takes them herself!
And on we go up the stairs. There's a little ledge around the stairs at the height of the floor of the second level, and I decided to put books around it – they remind me to read them and think about them as I go up- and downstairs. The only air conditioner in the place is in my bedroom, the door to the left off the landing at the top of the stairs. Sometimes I use the fan there to try to blow cool air down into the lower level. Fortunately it seems naturally cooler down there, as the lower-floor windows are more sheltered by overhangs outside.
To the right at the top of the stairs is the guest bedroom, which also serves as my extra closet and storeroom for suitcases, balikbayan boxes, etc..
Kinky's bedroom (she lets me stay here too), with the second amazing home theater setup.
Finally, here is the reason I moved from the other QC apartment – which is on another floor in the same building – to this one: the bathtub. I don't know who other than me would put an alcove off the bedroom containing only a bathtub, but how wonderful it is!!! The perfect place for reading all those books, as long as you don't mind a water-loving cat sitting on your chest while you're in the tub. It's very difficult to find a place with a bathtub in Manila. In this culture, people just don't take soaking baths – in fact, if someone says “I took a bath,” what they really mean is they took a shower. The concept of soaking in a tub of hot bathwater just doesn't register with most Filipinos. But some kindred spirit of mine designed this condo, and I lucked out in finding it. Once upon a time many years ago I saw a picture in Vogue or Architechtural Digest or some such magazine of what, as I recall, was the master bedroom in Gianni Versace's Manhattan apartment. He had a big claw-foot tub right in the middle of his bedroom. I thought, “someday when I grow up I want a bathtub in my bedroom too!” So I guess I'm grown up now!
