Chocolate Chip Cookies – Chewy, chocolaty, yumminess!

My Maternal Grandmother, Nana, had hip replacement surgery yesterday. The surgery itself went smoothly but she suffered a minor heart attack due to the stress. She is still in the ICU being monitored. Needless to say, I was extremely concerned and a nervous wreck all day. While this state was not conducive to working it did lend itself to baking, which is my favorite form of stress relief! So these chocolate chip cookies are for you, Nana!

I have been making this recipe since High School, and I have rarely strayed. There are millions of chocolate chip cookie recipes out there but I think that the cake flour really takes these to a whole new level of chewiness. In this recipe, I would suggest using semi-sweet chocolate chips because these cookies are so sweet that milk chocolate is just too sweet, and that means a lot coming from me.

Nestle Toll House invented chocolate chip cookies in the 1930’s by accident or so the legend goes! Europeans have been making different variations on the sugar cookie for centuries, but the Americans can lay claim to the masterpiece that is the chocolate chip cookie.

I don’t do crispy and my definition of crispy is fairly stringent: my fiancé thinks my “crispy” is what regular people consider “fully cooked.” I disagree, but I digress.

Lindsey’s Extremely Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Loosely Adapted from Nestle Toll House

• 3 ¼ cups All-purpose flour
• 1 cup Cake Flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 ½ cups butter, slightly softened
• 1 ¼ cups packed brown sugar
• 1 ¼ cups granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 ½ Tablespoons vanilla
• 1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon (Saigon, or the best you can find)
• 1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips (I use Ghirardelli, shh don’t tell Toll House)

1. Preheat your oven to 375°. Combine the flour, cake flour, baking soda, and baking powder; set aside.
2. Combine butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar, and beat until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla; mix thoroughly. Slowly add flour mixture until well mixed (3-4 additions); then stir in chips.
3. Make large balls of dough (approximately the size of half a lemon) if you are baking them now, or smaller balls if you are going to freeze them and bake them later.

4. Bake at 375° for 13.5 minutes or until the outsides have browned but the centers still look soft. My cookies do not look done when I remove them from the oven. Cool for 10 minutes on the cookie sheet and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

If you are baking them from frozen, place the desired number of frozen dough balls on a cookie sheet and bake 10+ minutes. I would start checking at 10 minutes. One word of caution from someone who always has frozen sugar cookie dough and chocolate chip cookie dough on hand, these little frozen chocolate chip balls are very, very hard to resist and rarely make it back on a cookie sheet in my house!