I tried another recipe from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc At Home today. Because the first one that I attempted didn’t turn out as I’d hoped (it was a roast chicken recipe that involved a mind-boggling amount of root vegetables which left me quite puzzled), I decided to shoot for something far simpler and with more crowd appeal. You might have guessed already – chocolate chip cookies! Although I’m partial to crunchy cookies, Keller’s description of his “crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside” discs of sinful pleasure swayed me this time round.
Even though his recipe called for only 12 minutes of baking time, what I had hoped to take about an hour ended up to be almost three hours of work. I fought the butter, sugar, egg, flour and hand-chopped dark chocolate (50% and 70%) into submission because I was not equipped with any kind of an electric mixer. Then, because I only had one small baking pan on hand, I had to divide and conquer the dough. I estimated it would take me about two to three rounds of baking but the first batch of cookies proved me dead wrong.
Conjoined cookies. Oh yeah. I admit I did chuckle when I first spotted them growing towards each other in the oven, but there was another problem which wiped the smile off my face. An underlying problem – literally. Not only did I have to perform separation surgery on the siblings, nearly all of them were glued to the pan and refused to budge so I resorted to cutting them out with a knife. Now, anybody who has ever baked cookies would have noticed the missing parchment paper by now. I’ve only ever made cookies twice before (both times with some sort of lining between sheet and dough), and I totally underestimated the problem of stickiness.
Chewy on the inside cookies turned out to be empty on the inside. The only good thing about dividing the dough into a few batches was that I could avoid making the same dumb mistakes. Smaller balls of dough, greater separation between cookies and aluminium foil did the trick subsequently. Now that the small box of unevenly-sized, bittersweet deliciousness is sitting on the kitchen counter, I cannot wait to dunk the contents one by one into a bath of cold milk and savour them.
