Poker Night Cookies
I made three batches of cookies for Saturday night poker:
Batch #10 “Thick and Chew Chocolate Chip Cookies”
This recipe is from Cook’s Illustrated. There is nothing unusual about the cookies except for the exceptional chewy goodness. The cookies are baked on parchment paper. The cookies are big, moist and chewy. The color isn’t very deep, but the flavor more than makes up for the lack of color. The recipe calls for you to make balls with the dough, ~ ¼ c. per cookie, then pull the ball in half and press together the rounded edges, leaving the rough, separated edges on the outside. I don’t know how this technique contributes to the final outcome, but the result is great. I’m sending it to the next round. This one was preferred by the poker players, even though chocolate chip cookies don’t match up very well with beer or Scotch.
Batch #11 “Thin, Crispy Chocolate Chip Cookies”
Also from Cook’s Illustrated. This recipe uses milk and light corn syrup, ingredients not common to chocolate chip cookies. It requires a stand mixer, but few mixing bowls. Definitely a plus in a kitchen where the cook is also the dishwasher. The cookies are really thin; they spread out a lot, melding together to form a few jumbo cookies. The flavor is sweeter than I like, but still pretty good. The cookie, though thin, isn't particularly crispy. It's very chewy, which I like, but too thin. Gentleman Caller likes the thin cookies, but says these aren’t as good as some of the earlier ones. This recipe gets tossed out.
Batch #12 “Old-Fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies”
Recipe from Bon Appétit. It calls for equal parts vegetable shortening (Crisco) and butter, so the cookie holds its shape well. Perhaps too well. The cookies are thick and almost shortbready, but not quite. They are pretty light in color. One poker player brought up an excellent point, though, and that was that for milk-dunking purposes, batches 10 and 11 won't cut it. Only this batch is thick enough to soak up enough milk. This criteria adds a new wrinkle to the competition. However, though it excels in dunkability, it is an unimpressive cookie in all other areas of comparison. So, a bit reluctantly, this is another for the recipe wasteland.
Moving right along! I had gotten a bit burned out on chocolate chip cookies after the batches last weekend, but the plethora of pumpkin cheesecakes in the meantime gave my palate a break. There has been some serious lobbying to have the molasses chocolate chip cookies moved to the “special ingredients” category because the molasses makes it unfair for the other plain chocolate chip cookies. After much deliberation and heated testimony, I have agreed to eliminate Batch #9 from the plain chocolate chip category.
With this, I have crossed the halfway mark. Ten more recipes to go. At this point, it seems to be never ending. I dream about baking cookies.