Delicious Bittersweet Chocolate Chip Cookies

This recipe is from my sister-in-law Eva.  She first introduced me to the delicious Ghiradelli Chocolate Premium Baking Chips and this combination of chocolates.  For this recipe I used one part Double Chocolate Bittersweet Chips and one part Nestle Tollhouse semi-sweet chips.  Thank you Eva for sharing this recipe!

Bittersweet Chocolate Chip Cookies
Eva's recipe

2 sticks of butter
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour* **
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup Nestle semi-sweet chocolate morsals
1 cup Ghiradelli double chocolate bittersweet chips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Butter should be soft and at room temperature.  Cream butter and sugars together until light and fluffy.  Add eggs, one at a time.  Add vanilla extract.  In a separate bowl whisk together flour, salt and baking powder.  Slowly add this to the butter/sugar mixture.  Add the chocholate chips slowly and mix gently.  Using a small ice cream scoop shape dough into about 1 1/2 inch spheres.  Chill the balls of dough in the refrigerator several hours until firm.  From here, I either bake immediately or move the shaped dough into a ziplock bag to the freezer for later use.  It is so nice having prepared cookie dough on hand at all times.  Bake at 375 degrees 8-10 minutes depending on your oven.  Rotate once during the baking process to ensure even baking.

*If you like chewier cookies use bread flour - this flour has more gluten, or protein making a denser cookie.  If you like your cookies softer and crisper use all purpose flour.  I normally use all purpose flour.
** For high-altitude bakers increase flour 1/8-1/4 cup.

Beautiful Hearts with Royal Icing and Fondant

Simple Circle cookies with royal icing and fondant accents

I like making my own fondant embellishments. For more info look at this post.

I absolutely love Lilaloa's chocolate cookie recipe. I thought I would never go through my Costco size cocoa powder but now it's gone. I think I'm addicted to these chocolate cookies. One of the great things about this recipe is that it as long as you have your butter nice ready at room temperature it goes fairly quickly.

Here are some chocolate cookie tips.

#1) stick with Lilaloa's recipe. Use the best ingredients you can afford. I've tried this with fancy cocoa powder and they were amazing. I want to try this with a mix of dark and regular chocolates. Just like I do with my favorite drop cookie recipe.

#2) Once my dough pulls away from the sides I know it's done. I'm using the Bosche mixer here. I'm so superstitious about my royal icing I mix my dough in the Bosch and only royal icing in the kitchenaid. I don't think the kitchenaid is happy about this, but the whole oil in the icing thing scares me.

#3) When you can buy a silcone rolling pin and the rubber bands to keep the dough even. I love these two tools. I am rolling at a 1/4 inch thickness.

4) It's not necessary for this cookie, but out of habit I'm chilling the cut cookies in the freezer for a bit. It will soon be summer in Phoenix and I will be relying on this technique a lot more as the temperature in my house rises.

5) Bake on a silpat. I recently did a side by side comparison between parchment and silpat baking and I had less spreading with the silicon mat... such an easy clean up as well. I let them cool on the baking sheet.

Now I am simply outlining the cookies with a thick royal icing and will flood them with a thinner royal icing. I need to practice taking pictures while I decorate. I still haven't figured out how to flood a cookie and take a picture at the same time.

Allow the icing to set for just a moment and ever so carefully drop the heart in the center of the cookie. If it falls in the wrong place, eat that cookie. YUM! Ideally, in the end it will look like the heart is sitting on a soft pillow. I love heart cookies. I think they can work for so many different events. The ones I did here are about 1 1/2 inches across.

This is a great choice if you're not a big fan of food dyes and if you don't like that break my tooth feeling from royal icing layered upon more royal icing.

Happy Baking!

World's Best Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Do you see all that chocolate?? Notice the large Chunks!

I really don't like sharing secrets. There I said it. Sometimes I just give the recipe, not the secrets. But recently my daughter Julianna asked me if I could write down some of my recipes so she could make them when she's a Mom. Good thing I have plenty of time before then. And she will need the secrets. So here they are.

Perfecting a dish is not in the recipe, it is in the details that are not written. That is why I love the Cooks Illustrated Series. They discuss everything why things work and don't work. Last week at the Costco Food court an old lady saw that I had 10 lbs of butter and 100 lbs of sugar in my cart and asked me why her cookies turned out flat. I talked with her for about and hour and it could have been much longer. Among other things, she was not pre-chilling her dough. I told her to add a bit more flour, form them while the dough was soft, chill, then bake. Just like I do with the sugar cookies.

So here it is, one of the last cookie recipes that you will ever need plus my secrets.

This is based on the Quaker Oatmeal Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Recipe, with a few important changes. It also tastes like the infamous Nieman Marcus cookie recipe, but that recipe is way too much work (shredding the chocolate and grinding the oats is not worth the effort).

Sweets by Suz - Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookie

Ingredients

2 sticks of butter* softened to room temperature, about 65 degrees

3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

1 1/2 cups bread flour**

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp. salt

3 cups Oatmeal***

2 cups chocolate

(or 2 cups total mix ins, see below for ideas)

Put butter out on counter the night before, or take out a couple of hours beforehand. In a pinch, I will put butter in the microwave to warm it, but results won't be as good and I always make a mess in my microwave. Make sure all your ingredients are fresh. If you don't bake often go out and buy new flour, baking soda, sugar, etc.

Beat butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla, scrape the bowl and continue to mix.

In a separate bowl whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, salt. Now add oats and chocolate; mix well. Add the flour mixture to the butter/sugar/egg mixture.

Place dough in the refrigerator. This step is essential if you want nice chunky cookies. If you don't care if they spread out, go ahead and bake them now.

[Alternatively, take a large portion of the dough, place in plastic wrap or parchment paper and wrap into a log about 1 1/2 inches thick. Think Nestle pre-prepared dough. You are making your own ready to use dough and it will taste much better than anything store-bought. When you are ready to make cookies, take out one of these rolls of dough and slice about 1 inch thick. Again, think about the prepared dough from the grocery store. It's the same thing... I don't need 1000 pictures to get this across, right? Prepared dough will last one month in the freezer and one week in the refrigerator, but please don't keep cookie dough in the refrigerator, it will start to taste like all the savory food ]

Place the cookies on a silpat mat, or parchment paper and bake at 375 degrees for 5 minutes.

Turn the trays and bake for another 5-7 minutes. Wash some dishes. Please do not leave the cookies unattended.

I can't tell you exact times because every oven is different. My sister Bina taught me so much about making cookies. I asked her why mine weren't turning out and she said I needed to stay by the oven and really pay attention to the cookies. With just a little love I learned to bake them perfectly. Her Zella's cookies are to die for.

If you have overcooked them a bit, put them directly on the cooling rack. If they are just barely done, leave them on the sheet to cool so they continue to cook.

*About the BUTTA... I usually use unsalted in my baking, but it will till taste great with salted. Be careful the brand you use. If you have one that works don't change this too much. I like Kirkland Signature.

**Bread flour - if you don't have any on hand, just use all-purpose. It will still be delicious. I just like the way the extra protein in the bread flour gives it more of a bite. Make sure there is enough flour added so you can form the dough into shapes. The dough shouldn't be overly sticky.

***Oatmeal: I either use quaker old-fashioned oats, or the quick oats. If you don't mind the chunky texture of the old-fashioned use those. If you want the oats to be more hidden use the quick oats.

High Altitude, add a bit extra flour and only bake when the dough is chilled. I was able to get this recipe to work in Mexico City so it should work in the mountains. Bread flour will also help with the high altitude.

Wonderful Additions or Substitutions:

Add nuts, we have nut allergies in my home so I stay away.

Add raisins, I kneed some into some of the dough for my husband.

Use at least two types of chocolate if you can. Try bittersweet, semi-sweet, milk chocolate, and even white chocolate.

White chocolate with craisins is fabulus.

Throw in chopped up heath candy bars.

This Halloween, we chopped up all the snickers, and they tasted great in this cookie. Don't get rid of all those candy bars, just throw them in to your cookies. You don't need 100 pinterest recipes for every variation.

Other great mix ins - m & ms, peanut m&ms, recesses, chopped snickers bars, milky way bars, hershey's gold chocolate, pecans, almonds, walnuts, butterscotch chips, peanut butter, peanut butter chips... I think I could go on and on. The point is, stick with a favorite recipe and add what you like. As a general rule, do not go much over 2 cups of mix ins with this recipe. You will not have enough dough to go around.

If you would like a more cakey cookie add one more egg yolk.

I buy my chocolate when it's on sale at Costco or after the holidays. I should post a picture of my chocolate stash but you might think I have a problem.

Can you ruin this recipe?

Oh yes you can - here's how. Spoiled ingredients, like old flour. What an awful flavor. Butter that tastes like onions. Once our kind neighbors gave us cookies that tasted like Kim-chi. No comment. Actually just keep your butter in the freezer. You can ruin this by adding too much salt or no salt. How else - under baking or over baking. So make sure you have best ingredients and give the cookie a little bit of love.

How not to eat these:

When they are warm out of the oven eat one or two. Then quickly wrap them individually in saran wrap for your kids' lunches, picnics, hikes, breakfast in a bind, etc. Or give them away to neighbors and friends before you've eaten a dozen. I know I have before.

Any questions??

Simple Valentines Day cookies

I wanted to try a quick sugar cookie recipe, one that wouldn't require 2 hrs in the refrigerator so I gave SweetSugarBelle's sugar cookie recipe a try. She is also baking in a dry climate so my results were great. I will use this recipe again if I am in a hurry. One complaint, using powdered sugar instead of granulated sugar gives the cookie a slightly different texture.

Now I'm going to ramble a bit. When my sister Rebecca and I were kids my Mom signed us up for a sugar cookie class at the Bloomfield Hills Public Library. We made dinosaurs out of cookie dough!!!! Amazing! My Mom raised seventeen kids and needless to say there was not much time for baking cookies. Anyhow, I can remember to this day the taste of those cookies and have searched and searched for a recipe that tasted just like those little Brontosaurs cookies. I have easily tried 20 or more different sugar cookie recipes in the past 15 years. For a long time I used this old Conant School recipe provided by my Sister Alison and posted by my sister Cathy. (She gives a lot of great tips on making rolled cookies).

Then this Fall, with the discovery of Pinterest, Becca found this recipe from the blog beeinourbonnet. I made it and called Becca right back with the happy realization that the beeinourbonnet cookies tasted just like the cookies we had made more than 25 years ago. We had been adding almond extract, but that little hint of lemon extract gave it the flavor we were looking for.

My point is, there is no perfect recipe for anything. You need to try as many as you can until you find that magical flavor you are looking for. And don't give up! (I still want to know the secret ingredients in a Cafe Rio salad and maybe it is crack after all).

So if you are in a hurry use SweetSugarBelle's recipe - just know the texture will ever so slightly resemble that of a mint milano, a little too melt in your mouth for me. For cookies with more of a bite to them, stick with the recipe from beeinourbonnet. She also gives great decorating tips and a royal icing recipe. I'm still trying out several types of icing and don't have a favorite - yet.

As to decorating these cookies, I outlined them working with about eight at a time then immediately flooded with Royal Icing. I keep my icing on the thin side so that the frosting layer is not too thick. Some I immediately covered in sanding sugar and the others I added sugar just to the edges the next day once the Royal Icing had time to dry. These were really easy and turned out cute. I feel a need to make more because I forgot to mix orange for this project. DOH! I wanted to have all the colors of the traditional conversation hearts.