A Cookie By Any Other Name
Gentleman Caller is out getting raunchy with the boys and I'm sitting home on a Friday night, hanging out with my blog. It is just as it should be. The blog never makes me listen to loud music and feel awkward for not dancing in a crowd of hippies. I don't even have to dress up or put on makeup. That's why we're such good friends.
Since my last post, about an hour ago and yesterday, I have been looking through the rest of my chocolate chip cookie recipes and have been able to weed out several. One I had tried long ago and written an unfavorable review. The recipe used a cake mix and I thought the cookies were too cakey and had a sharp texture that was painful. Felt "grating... like sandpaper against the roof of my mouth," I noted. Painful cookies, I think, can be eliminated without further review. Another recipe explicitly specified margarine. I never use margarine, so I never have it on hand. It also called for "butter flavoring." What's that? Why not just use butter? One very important quality of the Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie is that I can usually find all of the necessary ingredients in my cupboards. And, finally, I realized there were a few duplicate recipes, with different names. For example, the recipe on the bag of Ghirardelli chocolate chips (Batch #4, my favorite so far) is the same recipe as the one on the package of Tollhouse chocolate chips! Sneaky. But I'm wise to the ruse.
I've also decided to categorize the recipes and pick a winner in each category. The categories are: plain chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and chocolate chip cookies with other additions (cranberries, cocoa, specialty nuts, etc.) These categories are necessary. I've learned from reading reader reviews on some cooking magazine websites that oatmeal emphatically does not belong in a chocolate chip cookie. I, myself, quite enjoy oats in my cookie, but can see why purists oppose such an addition. I've tested 9 of the plain chocolate chip recipes; I have 11 to go. Then on to Round Two.
I should be tracking how much weight I'm probably gaining.