A cookie of any kind...

Another one of my favorite baked good recipes is a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from the Food Network. This recipe is great because not only is it super easy to make (I'm done with cookies to eat in about an hour), it's super forgiving with the ingredients.

I have substituted the chocolate chips with peanut butter, toffee, and butterscotch chips and they all taste great.

Once I forgot to put in the white sugar and only put in the brown sugar and they still tasted delicious, so now I just use brown sugar and basically halved the sugar in the recipe. (I wonder how much healthier it is now?) I've also used Splenda in place of the sugar as well.

Another time, I didn't have enough flour left in the kitchen, so I combined the rest of the white flour, the last of the organic flour (which usually didn't work too well for me), and some all-purpose baking mix that I found in our cupboard, to make the requisite 2.25 cups, and the cookies still came out light and chewy and yummy!

Here's my crinkled copy of the recipe, with my changes (less sugar, less time in the oven) noted.

Assembling all of my ingredients "mis en place".


The stick of butter...


The dry ingredients sifted together...


The melted butter with eggs, sugar, and vanilla.


Mixing the wet ingredients together.


Adding the dry ingredients to the wet. You don't need a mixer for this at all.


The mixed batter.


Adding the chips in. This time, these were butterscotch.


The batter with chips folded in. This is always my most difficult step since the bowl is pretty much filled with batter and chips and I don't want anything to spill over. But I do want the chips to be pretty well distributed throughout the batter. (Although according to my operations professor in b-school, this won't happen because of the Poisson distribution.)


Then I wet my hands and start rolling little balls of cookie dough. I've tried to keep the balls small because these are pretty rich cookies. And then they go in to bake for 10 minutes. Our oven is pretty hot, so I start checking around 8 minutes. They also keep cooking after you pull them out so you have to account for the extra browning that might occur.


Requisite shot of my trash bowl.


Finished cookies! Don't they look delicious? They're soft and bendable and super chewy. (Which I always prefer over cr