what's cooking wednesday - chocolate chip cookies

When you find a recipe on the internet that claims to be the best chocolate chip cookie recipe and over 6000 commenters agree, well you just have to give it a try. Don't you? Or is that just me? Chocolate chip cookies have never been anything I've had much success with. To be honest it's only recently I've sort of come into my own on the baking front. I'm a much better cook then I am a baker. Anyway, this weekend I thought I'd give these cookies a whirl with my trusty sous chef, Abby who ate her weight in cookie dough when she thought I wasn't looking.



Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
3 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp hot water
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream together the butter and sugars until smooth. beat in eggs one at a time, then stir in vanilla. Dissolve baking soda in hot water. Add to batter along with salt. Stir in flour, chocolate chip and the nuts. Drop by large spoonfuls onto ungreased pans.

Bake for 10 minutes or until edges are nicely browned.

Recipe Notes: I have mentioned before that the greatest thing about allrecipes.com is the user reviews on recipes. I tend to stick to recipes that are both highly rated and have more than a handful of reviews. For this recipe a lot of reviewers suggested using 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar and only 1/2 cup of white sugar, which I did. And it did give the cookie a richer taste. Mike said it was a good cookie, but not a great chocolate chip cookie. I'm not even sure what that means, but I do know those cookies were gone pretty damn fast. You can draw your own conclusions from that. The only other changes were milk chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet and I left out the walnuts entirely. Why? Because walnuts are from the devil. Major yuck!




What is What's Cooking Wednesday and how can I play?

What's cooking Wednesday was born out of a desire to get out of that what's for dinner rut. Playing is easy, on Wednesday post a recipe that has been tried and tested by you and then pop over here and add your name to the Mr. Linky. When entering your name also add the name of the recipe in brackets and make sure you link to your What's Cooking Wednesday post and not just your blog's front page. And don't forget to link back here, the home of What's Cooking Wednesday.

So for example I would write Shan (Speedy Chicken Stir Fry) in the name section. For the URL section I would post this: http://shanrev.blogspot.com/2007/10/whats-cooking-wednesday-speedy-chicken.html

I'll let you in on a little secret. Much to Kaffy's chagrin, my WCW recipes are almost never made on a Wednesday. So feel free to cook and photograph whenever you have time and join us posting on Wednesday.