Chocolate Chip Cookies

I felt like a snack around 11am today and since I'm trying to cut down on the amount of junk food we buy, I decided to make chocolate chip cookies. These are our go-to cookie. It's an easy recipe, they taste delicious and everyone who tastes them asks for a copy of the recipe. They are known as 'Sarah's Magic Choc Chip Cookies' by friends and family. 

I'm not really sure they're magic. They do taste pretty great, though!

Before I get to the recipe, let me just say that I used two of my most favourite kitchen tools for this recipe - my Candy Apple Red KitchenAid Mixer and my cookie scoop. I even took photos of them. Yeah, I'm kind of crazy when it comes to photos when I get in the mood to take them.

Exhibit A: KitchenAid Mixer

Not a wonderfully composed photo, I'll admit. I'll also admit that just to the right of the photo, past that cup tree is a pile of the kids' school paperwork that is very embarrassing. The kids' rooms are covered in pastings and drawing and painting and.. and.. and.. you get the idea. Anyway, just to the right of this picture is chaos that I was contorting myself around to get the photo of the mixer and not the mess. It'll do for now!

So this is my kitchen pride and joy. I saved up birthday money and Christmas money for a couple of years to buy this. I could have bought it at any time, really, but I could never justify the price; here in Australia they are close to $700. $700 that could be spent on the kids, on bills, on a new lens for one of my other favourite things, again, you get the idea. So, I saved up my money, money that was originally being saved for stamping and card making supplies and bit the bullet and bought it. I kind of justified it by using my money to buy it as a Mother's Day present. It's brilliant and I love it. A lot.

Exhibit B - Cookie Scoop

I have been trying to hunt down a lever action ice-cream scoop to use for cookies for months. Would you believe they are nearly impossible to find here? I saw a couple online at Amazon and the like and always put off buying them. We were out last week buying knives for the boys, I mean Santa was out buying knives for the boys. Ok, let me clarify that. Our boys are aged 8 and 6. They LOVE to cook with me. They love watching reality TV cooking competitions and recently we had one here called Junior MasterChef Australia - a competitive cooking show for kids aged between 8 and 12 years old. The kids loved it. All the kids in the show were given Scanpan Spectrum knives in the utility and Santoku styles. The kids said they were going to ask Santa to bring some for Christmas. The Santoku is basically a cook's knife the right size for kids. We didn't bother with the utility knives as I never use them. I'm pretty much a one knife girl most of the time.

Ok, where was I? Yes, buying the cookie scoop. So, the shop where we bought the knives also had these lever action ice-cream scoops. I bought a size 40 for cookies, which is a bit bigger than I wanted, but the didn't stock the smaller size. This one makes cookies that are about 3" wide, I guess. I prefer small cookies normally, but with how quick cookies are to make with this scoop, I'll settle for the big ones.

I also bought a size 20 which is bigger (the smaller the number, the bigger the scoop), for cupcakes. I haven't tried it out yet, maybe next week. You can usually tell what size your scoop is by looking at the base of the handle, or in the scoop bowl itself. Mine have the size punched in both places.

If you've made it this far, here's the recipe!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

125g of butter

1 cup raw sugar

1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 large egg

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups of SR flour

100g milk chocolate chips

100g white chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat oven to 170C/355F. 

Cream butter and both sugars until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and mix well, scrape down sides of bowl at least once. Add SR flour and mix until just mixed through. Scrape down the sides of the bowl again and make sure all flour is incorporated well. Add choc chips and give it a quick mix.

Roll into small balls - if I'm doing these by hand I make 1" balls, when using the cookie scoop they end up much bigger than this, maybe 1 1/2". Place on silicon paper or baking mat covered trays and bake.

Cooking time for 1" hand-rolled balls is 7 mins to get a chewy cookie, 9 mins to get a crisper cookie. Times may vary for your oven, so keep an eye on them for the last two minutes, they could turn dark quicker than expected.

Cooking time for size 40 cookie scoop - approx. 1 1/2" balls is 10 minutes for a chewy cookie and I'm guessing about 12 minutes for a crisper cookie. We prefer the chewy kind so I haven't tested crispy ones with the cookie scoop yet.

Let them cool on their baking sheets for a couple of mintes before transferring them to cooling trays. 

I dare you not to eat one right out of the oven. These cookies are worth burning your mouth on!

Note: An Australian 1 cup measure is 250mls, US 1 cup measures are slightly smaller, you may need to add a little more flour.