So today I have been missing home and all my people there. I miss having them close by to bake for. This is my favourite recipe, and I have been making it for my friends and family for a few years now, its got a bit of an ego by this point, so I thought it would be a good place to start.
Chocolate chip cookies are pretty simple really, hard to go wrong and maybe a bit overlooked perhaps. This recipe doesn’t try to do anything fancy to entice you, but once you start eating one you will be a convert – I think the secret might be the brown sugar, making them all tastily golden.
I was really mean to my poor mum and wouldn’t give her the recipe for ages, sorry about that mum.
Just one warning – they can be a bit addictive. At one point I had a flatmate who had a tendency to eat the whole mountain of freshly made biscuits during the night. I resolved this by giving each flatmate a ration of cookies, a little wrapped package of cookies outside their door. Still, they never lasted long.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from the Sunday magazine of the NZ Sunday Star times – which in turn was adapted from the Silver Palate Cookbook. Makes approximately 30 cookies.
250g butter (softened)
1 cup brown sugar
¾ cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 ¾ cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 ½ cups chopped dark chocolate
Preheat oven to 180⁰C
Line two oven trays with baking paper
Beat softened butter and sugars until pale and creamy (I do this by hand but an electric beater would be fine, cheating though)
Beat in eggs and vanilla
Sift dry ingredients together, then sift them into the wet mixture
Add the chopped chocolate and mix through
Place well-spaced spoonfuls of mixture onto the trays (walnut sized for small cookies)
Bake for around 10 minutes, until golden
Cool for a few minutes then transfer cookies to a cooling rack
These cookies are great with chopped dried apricot added with the chocolate and a mix of dark and milk chocolate works well too. I have recently discovered that the uncooked dough freezes well, which can be useful as the recipe makes a big batch. Freeze them in balls on a tray then they can be thrown in the oven straight from the freezer to tame a midnight sugar craving. Just don’t start eating them straight from the freezer as I did, they are addictive in any form.
