This column is my summertime gift to you, even if baking cookies isn’t something you generally think about on sweltering summer days.
But surely it will get cool again eventually.
I’m out in California visiting my daughter and her family, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to write a quick column about the recipe for the best chocolate chip cookies in the world.
Now this might seem like an easy way out for a column during a week while I’m gone, but this column has actually been at least 35 years in the making. That’s how long I have been trying to perfect chocolate chip cookies. All I have ever wanted is a recipe for cookies that always turns out perfectly — fat and chewy with crinkles on the top.
Sometimes mine looked like that, sometimes they didn’t, and I never knew what I did wrong. Sometimes for no apparent reason they were flat and spread out with lumps of chocolate chips like black rocks in a brown desert. My son-in-law is the only one who likes those, but since they moved away five years ago, there just hasn’t been much of a market for them on a Sunday evening.
So I kept on trying. I even did an experiment years ago and turned it into an article for the Register & Bee. I spent a morning baking cookies and then had everyone vote on different recipes, butter versus margarine, hand mixing versus mixer mixing, etc., etc. I called Nestle and interviewed the experts there, finding out I knew more about baking cookies than they did.
All I learned was that the news staff can eat a lot of chocolate chip cookies really fast and I can get which cookie is which confused just as quickly. I proved nothing. Yet I soldiered on.
I finally found the perfect chocolate chip — Ghirardelli. But then I had a granddaughter with a peanut allergy and had to go with either Hershey’s or the store brands that don’t taste as good but seem to preserve lives.
My daughter’s best friend in high school had a good recipe, but it made only about a dozen cookies and nothing that made only a dozen of anything was very practical in our household. So Mary Susan and I saved that recipe for when it was only the two of us at home.
But then my daughter-in-law Karissa posted a life-changing message on Facebook: Something like “I just made seven dozen delicious chocolate chip cookies with vanilla pudding in them.” She’s a professional photographer too, so the picture just drew me in.
And she was right! The cookies are perfect. Fat and crinkly — just like me in about 20 years, or less, especially if I use this recipe often.
So here is the recipe for Chocolate Chip Pudding Cookies. I suppose you can change the flavor of the cookie by changing the flavor of the pudding, and you can use any kind of chips, nuts, dried fruits (cherries are good!) or chopped-up candy bars you want.
First off, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Stir together 4 ½ cups all-purpose flour and 2 teaspoons baking soda in separate bowl and set aside. In a large bowl, cream 3 sticks of softened butter, 1 ½ cups brown and 1 cup white sugar. Beat in 2 small packages of instant vanilla pudding and mix until well blended. Stir in 4 eggs and 2 teaspoons vanilla. When smooth, slowly add in the flour mixture and mix well. Finally, add the four cups of fillers.
Make sure not to over-bake them. Start at 10 minutes for rounded tablespoons and increase by one minute at a time if the cookies aren’t slightly brown on top. But never, never over-bake a cookie. I think it might be a sin.
Certainly nothing is more disappointing at a covered dish dinner than when someone brings a plate of cookies that are burned on the bottom.
The recipe makes a bunch so bake some on a cooler evening than we’ve been having lately and freeze some for later. For a real summer treat, fill two cookies with softened vanilla ice cream and freeze to make a homemade ice cream sandwich.
I’ll let you know next week what California is like — if I survive the plane trip and any earthquakes or tsunamis and if a redwood tree doesn’t fall on me.
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