A Quarter Cup of Cocoa…and….

Here I sit watching my favorite Saturday morning show (Pioneer Woman…just can’t get enough the “life on the ranch” and cooking for her family stuff…horses, baking, cooking…how can you go wrong with that?)

I have had a hankering to bake something with the Irish butter I bought last weekend. So, I decided bake a few cookies. As always, I can’t just leave a recipe alone. So, I hauled out Old Faithful (also known as the New Doubleday Cookbook) and opened to page 831 where a pretty good recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies sits. And…what did I do? What did *I* do? Adjust it, of course. I am pretty sure, even before I turn on the oven (I can’t preheat while I’m mixing until the hot-flashes stop…) that these are gonna be great cookies. So, here’s what I did:

1 cup plus 2 tbsp AP flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup cocoa

1 tsp espresso powder

Sift these together and set aside.

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup plus 1 tbsp sugar

1/3 cup plus 1 tbsp firmly packed light brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Cream these together until light and fluffy (scrape down sides of bowl as necessary)

1 egg

Add and beat well.

Mix in the dry ingredients. Add in:

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (I actually used 60% cacao chips)

3/4 cup white chocolate chips

Refrigerate dough for about 20 minutes.

Drop by rounded 1/2 tbsp on lightly greased baking sheets spacing cookies 2″ apart (they’ll spread)

Bake 10-12 minutes. Transfer immediately to wire racks to cool.

It’s hard to keep the quality control team away from cookies…even though I recommended to wait until they have cooled for a bit longer. Only complaint I got was that they were really soft and falling apart (ahem…let them cool a little longer?)

The original recipe was sans:

cocoa, espresso powder, white chocolate chips

Instead, it had pecans (1/2 cup coarsely chopped). I don’t mind pecans but I really don’t like them in cookies. Why? I dunno. And Jim doesn’t like them in cookies either. So…they were voted off the island.

By the way, I’ve decided that my half sheet pan is the best pan to make…well, almost anything on. I’ve got old “jelly roll pans” that I’ve used for years as cookie baking implements but they just don’t stand up to the awesomeness of this brand new (okay, it’s a few years old) shiny half-sheet pan.

My final pile of cookies: