We'll see.
We cook a lot. And when I say cook, I mostly mean bake. There's a subtle difference and the difference is, usually, sugar.
Today we made what we affectionately named "Chocolate is Flying Everywhere Cookies." Between the three little hands "helping" me with the beaters and the rather large amount of flour this recipe calls for, there was, well, chocolate dough flying everywhere. Hence the name.
We based our recipe off of a recipe found in a great little cook book that a friend gave me called International Flavours. It is a book filled with recipes from around the world and was put together by the students, teachers, and staff of the GDQ School, an international Christian school. A great book for missionary families, I'd like to note. The original recipe is called "The best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever." (From the Hartmann Family, thank you Hartmanns!") An impressive title! But even though we took many liberties, cutting down some ingredients and adding others, I am happy to report that they did live up to their original name of "The best ever."
I bet on cooking blogs you have to be really specific. Yeah, um, sorry. We're kinda' loosey-goosey over here so, bear with me.
First the recipe said to mix one cup of butter with 1 1/2 cups of white sugar and two cups of brown. Holy cow that's a lot of sugar! And butter! I cut it down to one cup of white sugar and about one and a half cups of brown, but put in a little more than a cup of butter, because I walk on the wild side. As I mentioned before, I had three sets of little hands helping me hold the beater as we beat the butter and sugar together. You would think that this would almost ensure that you would never drop the mixer, but oddly, the exact *opposite* is true.
Then my 5 yr old cracked up when I said, "Hang on, I need to mash some of that butter better!" And then my 1 1/2 yr old laughed hysterically every time I turned the beaters on after that. They can't help it, I'm just SO funny like that.
So then we added three eggs and two tsps of vanilla. Mmmm, vanilla...
Oh, where was I? Sorry, the smell of vanilla takes me to far away places.
Ok, so then in a separate big bowl we mixed about four cups of flour (the original recipe called for six. Six! I thought that was a little much.) with 1 1/2 tsps of salt, two tsps of baking powder and enough coco powder to make it reasonably dark. I don't know, maybe 1/4 cup? Go with your gut. The original recipe did not call for coco powder, but we left out the chocolate chips and put that in instead because all of this originally started when one cute kid wanted to make cookies and another cute kid wanted brownies. Brownie cookies! Voila! Problem solved, tears abated, life is good.
Finally we slowly poured the bowl of dry ingredients into the bowl of wet ingredients whilst beating and this is where flying chocolate happened. It was a fairly shallow bowl, maybe that was the problem. I don't know, but three kids running wildly around the room eating chocolate cookie dough off the walls left me time to mix in peace.
Time to roll spoon-sized bits of the gooey brown dough into balls and set them on the pan!
This is about the time that my 3 yr old noticed how much flour had gotten onto her black dress. Appaling. I mean, you just can't go around with flour on your cloths and "Why don't you wipe it off?", while a sensible query to you and I, is nothing but an insult to a young child's dignity. So she stripped naked and we continued on with our work. If you've never baked with a naked three yr old before, you've never really baked.
We cooked the cookies at 180 C for 8-10 minutes. I'm happy to report that we only had two meltdowns in that entire time about "when the cookies would *ever* be done!" And only one of those melt downs came from me! Woo-hoo! Really though. Imagine having to wait eight *whole* minutes for something. In todays world that's practically an infraction on human rights.
Finally we ate them while they were still so hot that we could barely hold them. They're best that way, you know. They were quite moist (all the butter?) and so delicious. I highly recommend this recipe :D
