I’m still trying to find the best ever chocolate chip cookie recipe, kinda like everyone else in the known universe. Christmas is RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER and I still haven’t found anything that doesn’t turn to kind of gritty uninspiring softness by the time I get round to giving them out.

Recently I’ve gone back to basics and I’m trying to love the Tollhouse cookie recipe, but I’m not entirely convinced.

Recipe (half batch only, we have to eat these suckers in the name of experimentation) :

1 1/8 c flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 c (113g) soft butter
1/4 c brown sugar
1/2 c white sugar

1 tsp vanilla
1 eggy

@100g chocolate chips, chunks, whatever

Bake at 180, around 10min – the longer they’re in the crunchier they get, you know the drill.

Verdict? Eh. I still think the Tollhouse recipe is kinda eggy tasting. If I made the full batch I’d still only go with one egg, and that just brings about a whoooole new set of exciting food chemistry tweaking. These are great when they’re warm out of the oven but a little baking soda-y and greasy feeling afterwards. And of course, like everything else in this humid place, they go soft pretty much immediately. Stoopid humidity.

Chocolate tends to be whatever I have in the cupboard, which is usually some kind of dark, either Whittakers or Cadbury. Just chop it up and biff it in, bunch of different sizes, not too scientific.

I never just -eat- dark chocolate, for the same reason I can’t drink black coffee or strong tea. It’s too acidic and just… not right. It’s good for baking cause it goes nicely melty, but I think I’m going to stick with the half milk and half dark. Milk is really too sweet for baking, but it gets a nice gommy stickyness to it that can’t be good for your teeth, and it does offset the dark somewhat. White’s good too, but you might as well just dump a buttload of extra sugar in the mix, since it loses any flavour it might have had once it’s in the cookie.

I never use unsalted butter, so the extra salt here is in fact extra. Again, it offsets the chocolate and I vastly prefer a saltier dough to a more bland one. Kind of like porridge, which is an entirely different thing to convince people of.

So, hmm. I might continue tweaking this or just give up and find something else to play with. Why does it have to be so difficult? So deliciously difficult… mmm… cookies…