Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Miss Yunks thinks about cookies a lot and in her home she talks about cookies a lot. After a conversation about our favorite chocolate chip cookies, she was determined to find a new recipe for her favorite cookie.

I love thick, chewy chocolate chip cookies. I’ve made plenty of cookies before, but I’ve never had one go-to recipe, other than the recipe on the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip package, which is close to perfect in my mind. Nestle Toll House cookies fresh from the oven are perfectly soft and gooey, but they don’t stay that way. I wanted a cookie that was chewy fresh out of the oven and also later that week. I searched the blog world and stumbled upon this Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from Heather Homemade.  The name was enough for me, plus her mouth-watering photos of huge cookies full of chocolate chunks.  I also liked Heather’s technique. She didn’t just spoon the cookie dough onto her baking sheet. Instead, she made a ball of dough, then split it into two balls, then joined the two balls back together with ragged edges up. This process forms perfectly round cookies – unless you accidentally make them too big and they into each other while making. That may have happened to me.

The first time I made these cookies I followed the recipe pretty closely. The only adjustment I made was using 1 stick of butter instead of 1 1/2 sticks.

I got no complaints about the taste so I felt good about using just a little less butter. I only received a request for the cookies to be even softer. That’s right, BF asked me to decrease the baking time. Fine by me! I don’t normally make cookies twice in one week, but I was just so happy that BF liked them and that he’s come around to sweets so much. When we started dating, he was not interested in desserts. In the past few years he’s grown from passing on dessert to asking me to share his dessert when we’re out and asking me to bake more cookies at home. I just love having a positive dessert effect on people.

The first batch of cookies was good.

But the second batch was even better.

Can you see the difference? I decreased the baking time to 12 minutes from the suggested 15-18 minutes. 12 minutes resulted in a soft cookie for the whole life of the cookie, which wasn’t that long. They were perfectly soft and gooey fresh from the oven and equally soft the next day.

I learned that using melted butter rather than softened butter gives the chewy texture. Thanks for the recipe, Heather! I couldn’t even resist a bite until I finished my cookie photo shoot. They’re that good.