Please and Thank You

Being that I bought an entire pound of bittersweet chocolate to make a flourless chocolate cake while we were away in Bend last weekend, only to discover that I needed an electric mixer and had none, I decided that something was to be done with all that chocolate. It's been a while since I made some good ol' fashioned chocolate chip cookies. I came across the NY Times Jacques Torres' recipe via Nosh and Tell and decided to give it a go.

Jacques Torres' Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup sugar

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 egg

3/4 cup plus 1/2 tablespoon cake flour (I used regular flour)

3/4 cup bread flour

1/4 tablespoon salt (you can sprinkle coarse salt on top in lieu of this)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 tablespoon vanilla

1/2 pound or 8 oz best-quality semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped (I used 1 bar of 4 oz bittersweet Ghirardelli chocolate and found them to be chocolate-y enough)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large bowl cream together butter and sugars. Add egg and mix well. Add both flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and vanilla, mix well until combined. Fold in chocolate chunks.

*Instead of adding salt to the recipe, I sprinkled coarse salt on top of the cookies before baking. I've been seeing some food bloggers do this and since I'm such a fan of the coarse sugar/salt thing, I jumped right on that bandwagon.

Using a 4 ounce scoop for larger cookies or a tablespoon scoop for smaller cookies scoop cookie dough onto prepared cookie sheet placing about 2 inches apart. Bake until lightly browned, but still soft, about 20 minutes for larger cookies and 15 for smaller cookies. Cool slightly on baking sheets before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

My oven cooks a little high so I took these cookies out at about 11 minutes. I like to take cookies out a tad early and then let them finish cooking on the sheet before removing them. I find you get a better consistency that way.

These cookies were near perfect when cooled just a little but still warm. They hardened up more than I like after they completely cooled. Not a terrible recipe, and maybe it's the fact that I didn't use the fancy flour, but I like my cookies less crunchy. Back to my Joy of Cooking standby!

Sitting Pretty

And they all lived happily ever after.