The Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

This is my signature recipe. This is not a secret recipe. I feel strongly against the hording of recipes but there is so much history with this recipe that there was no way I could summarize it in an introductory paragraph. So here is the recipe first and the saga of my life with this recipe afterwards if you care to read it.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

2/3 cup Crisco Vegetable Shortening
2/3 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips or 1 ½ cups M&M’s

Preheat oven to 375°F. Mix shortening and butter, add sugars, mix until combined, then the eggs and vanilla, mix thoroughly. In a separate bowl combine flour, salt and baking soda. Add to creamed mixture in two additions, just until flour is combined. Mix in chocolate chips or M&M’s. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls 2 inches apart onto ungreased baking sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes. Cool slightly before removing from baking sheet.

Makes as many as are left after eating ample amounts of cookie dough.

Adapted from Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook

This is the first thing I ever made by myself from start to finish. I was in third grade and on a Sunday afternoon in late winter I asked my mother to bake some cookies. She was always very accommodating with such a request but on this particular Sunday she was in bed reading a book, a very rare occasion for a mother of four children ages 9, 8, 5 and 4 at the time. She told me that if I could read, and I was an avid reader, I could make the cookies myself.

I was not so sure. I do not remember possessing any self-confidence whatsoever until college. I ran up the stairs several times to ask a question about the recipe, to ask if my neighbor Susannah, who was at the back door could help me, to ask what to do about dropping all of the cookie dough on the floor. The recipe was patiently explained, I was told I needed to do this on my own and that I should put the dough back in the bowl and proceed. The cookies were terrible. Burned black on the bottom and as hard as doorknobs. My brothers for years called my cookies doorknob cookies. My second batch, which was prepared at my grandparent’s house a few weeks later was not much better. I had used all butter instead of the half margarine-half Crisco combination my mother adhered to and the cookies spread across the pan. With months of practice the cookies improved.

In college my friends and I trekked to the grocery store to buy the ingredients and prepared them in the kitchen off the lobby of our dorm attracting any number of willing taste testers. When I moved off campus my junior year I bought a hand mixer and would routinely leave my books at the library to go back to my apartment, make a batch of cookies and return to the library with cookies for my friends. They were still warm. A guy once came up to my roommate and I at a bar and said. “You live in the cookie house don’t you? I deliver for Rocky’s and we fight over who gets to deliver to your address because you always tip us with a bag of cookies.”

Cookies were a great flirtation device. I once made a batch to put in a care package for a scope who lived out of state. Several of my roommates, you have to love off-campus living, 6 girls, 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, asked for one and I said they could have the factory rejects. I cast a discerning eye over the cooling batch and declared them all perfect. K slammed her fist into the closest one and said, “That ones not perfect.” She and I even had a cookie bake-off one afternoon. The judges were afraid to vote. When I went to Scotland for a semester my roommates lost five pounds. My grandparents gave me a Kitchen Aid mixer when I finally graduated from college after five scenic years on the mighty Chip.

In Scotland I substituted Crisco for Cook-keen with marginal results. When I returned to Scotland for a year long position the cookies were renamed Body Purification Cookies because we always made a batch the night before the next big diet began.

I make these cookies often for my family. One of my favorite memories from growing up is walking through the door after school and smelling these cookies baking. My children are being raised on the same experience.