Cookies

Alright you guys. I’m pretty sure this is it. Like, the one. The cookie recipe I’ve been searching for. This Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from King Arthur Flour is seriously perfection.

Call me crazy, and I know we’re only 16 (with 36 left to go) recipes into the Chocolate Chip Cookie Experiment, but I’m honestly tempted to look no farther! This recipe from King Arthur Flour is everything I’m looking for…

Let’s talk about qualifiers for a perfect chocolate chip cookie:

This recipe has come highly recommended from bloggers and home bakers all over the place, and I was super excited to try it. If you don’t know it yet, Chocolate Chip Cookies are my jam. And any CCC recipe that comes this highly recommended puts me over the moon 🙂

And they’re totally worth the recommendation. But first, I have to tell you the pains I took to get my hands on the original recipe for these guys…

Do you guys remember the Neiman Marcus Cookies? They’re famous for having a recipe that cost Neiman Marcus patrons $250 to acquire.

Well, this recipe didn’t cost me $250. But it did cost me 39.99. Which, you know… is kind of equally annoying.

I found lots of recipes for these cookies from other bloggers. But I’ve been really committed through this experiment to follow each original recipe exactly to the letter. And I didn’t want to go off of another blogger’s version of the recipe in case they had changed a little something here or there.

So I found the original recipe on the Cook’s Illustrated website… available only to their paying subscribers. But they had a 30-day free trial option– provided you entered your credit card information, of course…which I did. I figured I’d just cancel once I got the recipe.

But then I thought… what’s so great about this site that you have to pay 39.99/month for access to their recipes?? Maybe I’ll just try it out for the month and see if I find any other really cool recipes.

You can guess the rest. I put a reminder to cancel up on the white board in my office, and Emma covered it up with some of her artwork… and today the subscription fee came out of my account.

And if you were wondering… nope. I haven’t re-visited the site since that first fateful day that I nabbed this chocolate chip cookie recipe. Not even once.

But I guess the silver lining to to this story is that we can all rest easy knowing that this is for sure the original and exact Cook’s Illustrated Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies!

So I bet you’re all wondering… was the 39.99 worth it?

Well, in all honesty, I would have been just as happy eating  AllRecipes.com #1 Ranked Chocolate Chip Cookies or Food Network’s Simple Chocolate Chip Cookies (recipes that I didn’t have to pay for). But I will concede that this Cook’s Illustrated recipe is pretty darn good! It possibly broke into my top 5 favorites, so I guess that’s saying something (as we are now 15 recipes into the Chocolate Chip Cookie Experiment!!!). I love the flavor you get by using more brown sugar than most recipes call for. And by melting the butter and adding an extra egg yolk, this recipe yields a chewier cookie than most. Overall: very yummy!!

However… please feel free to donate 39.99 to Something Swanky each time you visit for the recipe 😉

Welcome to recipe post number TWELVE in this Chocolate Chip Cookie Experiment. Admittedly, the experiment is going a little slower than expected since it’s really turned into more of an every-other-week thing rather than a weekly thing. But, no complaints here! Chocolate chip cookies are my personal favorite dessert after all, so I don’t mind dragging it out a bit 😉

For those of you who are just tuning in… I’m on a quest to find the most perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe ever– even if it takes me a year’s worth of experimenting! So far, my favorites have been:

DoubleTree Hotel Chocolate Chip Cookies– these have been my husband’s favorites too. They are chock full of chips, oats, and walnuts. But my favorite part about these cookies is that the oats and walnuts are not overly detectable. They are blended and chopped very finely, so that they just add a lot of girth to each bite rather than chunks. Love, love, LOVE!

NY Times Quintessential Chocolate Chip Cookies– these are another family favorite. You get a big mouthful of chocolate in every bite of these, which makes them absolutely to die for!

AllRecipes.com #1 CCC– I loved the simplicity of these cookies. It’s basically the same recipe I’ve been using for years, and there’s a reason I’ve held on to it for so long– it’s a good, solid, basic recipe with very little fuss and a lot of great taste.

I enjoyed the recipe from AllRecipes.com so much, that I decided I’d try a recipe from another user-submission-based site: Food.com. While this recipe didn’t have as many reviews as the one from AllRecipes, it did have a 100% positive rating with TONS of comments from people who tried and loved the recipe.

For those of you who are new to Something Swanky (or maybe you’ve just missed these posts), I’m working on a Chocolate Chip Cookie Experiment that basically boils down to me trying as many chocolate chip cookie recipes as I can get my hands on (I’m shooting for 52, 1 recipe per week for a year)! And then, of course, culminating the experiment with an ultimate chocolate chip cookie recipe to top all others… at least that’s the idea 😉

If you’d like to see all the other recipes I’ve tried so far, click here.

Today’s recipe comes from Allrecipes.com. For years before Pinterest and before I started blogging, Allrecipes.com was my go-to for recipes. I always liked that you could check out ratings and reviews from other people who had tried the recipe.

Of course, these days, I typically search Pinterest or a reliable blog for a recipe instead. But I’ll still glance through allrecipes.com from time to time. I think those recipes that have a 4-5 star rating with tons of reviewers are almost always worth taking the time to check out, and I definitely thought it would be worthwhile to include their top-rated Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe in my experiment.

I was pretty pleased to find that this recipe closely resembles my current go-to recipe that I’ve used for years, right down to dissolving the baking soda before mixing. I really, really liked these. I felt like the buttery/salty flavors were perfectly in tune with the rest of the cookie flavors, and the texture was just right too– soft and chewy (maybe even slightly underbaked) in the middle, with a good crunch at the edges.

With a 4.5 star rating out of over 6.5K reviews, I’d say this cookie is well-deserving of it’s rank!