urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:nleavitt Now with more zing. NEd 2038-01-19T03:14:07Z urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:nleavitt:17339 2038-01-19T03:14:07Z 2038-01-19T03:14:07Z I do a fair bit of baking. I find it relaxing, plus i have a killer sweet tooth, and anything made from scratch is better tasting, healthier, and usually cheeper than what you buy at the supermarket. I tend to stick a few standards: Banana Bread (with chocolate chips or cranberries), sugar cookies around Christmas. On occasion, i would make choclate chip cookies, but much less often that the others. Until now, anyways.One thing I started to really learn last summer was how different ingredients affect the final product; eggs give consistency, baking soda makes it fluffier, salt neutralizes the bitterness from the bakind soda. And the ratio of white sugar to brown sugar determines how soft a chocolate cookie is. The recipe i used to use produces a very crunchy cookie, not my preference. So i looked around the old interweb for a "chewy" recipe, and tried one that has worked perfectly. I doubled it, of course, letting one batch last for 3 days in my house instead of 2. And I use vegetable oil instead of butter, becuase butter is a pain to measure, soften and mix when i could just poor out of a bottle. For banana bread i use olive oil, but when I used some olive oil for the cookies, a few of them kinda tasted like olive oil, so i'm sticking to canola oil for tonights batch. The other trick i have found with cookies is, when they tell you how much chocolate chips to use, they tend to say "1 small package". This is a huge load of crap, unless there are small, snack size bags of chips. I just judge by eye how many to poor in to the batter, but it's closer to 1/4 of the bag i've got, and even one of the smaller bags would be too much. You'd just have chips left i the bole that you couldn't get to stick in the batter. wasted. <br /><br />Anyway, here is the (doubled) recipe, with instructions.<br />Mix 1 cup of butter (or vegetable oil), 1 cup of brown sugar, and 1/2 cup of white sugar. MiX in 2 eggs and 1 tsp of vanilla.<br />Seperately, combine 2 1/4 cups flour, 1 tsp of salt, and 1 tsp baking soda. To combine the wet and dry ingredients, a mixer will not work very well, so use a wooden spoon, or do like i do and get in there with your (clean!) hands. After the flour is well mixed in, add an appropriate amount of chocalate chips and mix. Bake at 325 degrees for about 6 min or until they start to brown. About 10 mins with my oven.<br /><br />Update: they lasted two whole days. oh well.