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 😉