Tim's Chocolate Chip Cookies

As shared by Tim…

In my last year of college I made the decision to move to California and seek my fortune as a programmer. The worry that I wouldn’t be able to make friends was a source of stress at the time, so I set about brainstorming potential solutions. After some considered thinking, I decided that the common ground all people share is a love of cookies. If you ask someone over for dinner, it’s a fair investment of time and energy for both people involved. If you invite someone to coffee downtown, you don’t open your house as familiar and welcoming place. However, if you invite someone over for fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies, it’s all but impossible for them to resist.

Being a man of science, I began by experimenting with various recipes from the internet, varying the many variables, and generating a rough formula that mapped proportions of ingredients to end effects. Lucy and I baked countless batches of chocolate-chip cookies from recipes as simple as the classic Tollhouse recipe to experimental blog recipes sweetened by instant pudding mix. By the time I moved west, I had a pretty firm grasp of the parameters, and a solid recipe. When Lucy joined me in Berkeley some years later, we picked up the old recipe and performed a series of methodical iterations (versioned 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2) to polish it into the recipe we have now fallen in love with. It is sure to help you make friends.

Ingredients:

• 1 cp brown sugar (dark as night)
• 1/2 cp white sugar
• 2 sticks Challenge unsalted butter
• 1.5 ea eggs (whisk two together in a bowl, but only use three-quarters of it)
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 cp flour
• 1 tbs baker’s cocoa powder
• 1 bag frozen Guittard semi-sweet chocolate chips

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350° degrees
2. Cut chilled butter up into chunks
3. Add sugar to butter
4. Cream butter and sugar together with your hands until smooth and partly-melted
5. Whisk two eggs together in a bowl and only add three-quarters of it to the mix
6. Mix in vanilla and salt
7. In a separate bowl, mix the baking soda, flour, and cocoa powder
8. With a wooden spoon, add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients (don’t over-stir)
9. Add the frozen chocolate chips to the batter (chilling the dough instantly)
10. Spoon the dough in 1.5-inch-diameter chunks onto a cool, heavy-duty aluminum cookie sheet
11. Bake for 10-15 minutes (varies by oven temperature and preferences of the baker)