Hello! I have been indulging in the dark art of bakery a bit..

Hello! I have been indulging in the dark art of bakery a bit lately. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling more alive than usual that one of my migratory hobbies has returned to nest for the winter months and I’ve been refining a cookie recipe. 

Just for clarification for the US readers, here in the UK what you call cookies are called biscuits and a cookie is a specific breed; a sweet, chewy, crunchy, goo-y and chocolate chip-y breed. Now, there are many brands and makes of cookie available in UK, many places to buy them from and they all range in quality. Annoyingly it’s very hard to find a really good cookie, a thouroughbred if you will. They’re always too crunchy or too goo-y or soft or just wrong. I don’t even know where my lofty cookie expectations come from honestly, I just know I have longed for a good cookie and none have scratched that itch… UNTIL NOW

I had a baking spat a few years ago before I left my old life, no-doubt trying to mask the reality of my miserable situation with butter, sugar and flour. There were a load of videos on YouTube called things like “THE BEST COOKIE EVER 100 HOURS TO MAKE” And I tried a load of them and they all SUCKED. They did not make cookies, they made hot cookie dough that was too rich to eat on its own. It went great with ice-cream on the side like a pudding or something but as a biscuit they sucked incredibly. Despite that, I ate far too much of it and consequently put cookie research on ice. 

Now though, I have landed on a damn good cookie. My own little adaption of all I learned, it’s not going to earn any awards or change the world, but if you ate one you would say “MM, that’s a yummy cookie!” And that’s all I ever wanted.

So, here goes:

ALICE’S YUMMY COOKIES

Ingredients:

180g unsalted butter

100g Dark brown soft sugar

150g Light brown soft sugar

100g white granulated sugar

275g plain white flour

1 large egg, room temperature 

1 large egg yolk, room temperature 

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp of bicarbonate of soda

1/2 tsp of sea salt

250g milk chocolate chips

150g dark chocolate chips

First thing to do is measure out all the different sugars. Be sure to have two bowls for each variety to facilitate easy re-weighing. You have to re-weigh all the ingredients several times because you’re an idiot who can’t do anything right and you’d be a damn fool to believe you could measure out 100 grams on a scale correctly first or even second time. Once you’ve assured yourself a few times that the scales are working correctly and everything is as it should be, time to admire the sugar. Baked goods need to be made with love and I’ve found love mixes best with sugar before any other ingredients are involved to make it feel overlooked. Look lovingly into each bowl, tell the granules how pretty they are, flirt them up a bit but not too much; you want to infuse the sugar with love, not lust, trust me on that one. I find giving the dark brown sugar some kisses works great, it seems to be a particularly love starved sweetener.

Now you can do the thing you really should have done first but forgot to, which is to brown the butter. Put the butter in a pot on a low heat until it melts, don’t touch butter with your fingers at any point or you will have to compulsively lick them for a while and then wash your hands again (You did wash your hands, right?). Once melted, keep the butter on a medium heat and keep stirring it. This a hard bit, you need the heat to make the butter go golden brown but too much heat makes the butter ANGRY and it will spit at you and try to kill you and if it’s gets super mad it will go black and taste like burnt shit. Ideally It’ll like, foam up, then go clear and bubbly, then it will foam up again and go golden brown and start to smell like butterscotch or Worther’s Originals. I find sort of hesitantly holding the pot hovering over a medium heat while stirring, raising and lowering the pot to keep its temper in check works well for me. This is also why I use unsalted butter because I just can’t make this work with salted, salted butter has anger issues or something.

Anyway, once that’s done, you can do the sugar part while the butter cools down a bit, then you can do the other ingredients. 

Lay two large eggs. If you can’t lay your own eggs, then you can substitute with chicken eggs. You can find chicken eggs in normal shops, chicken nests or, if you want to cut out the middle man, inside of chicken cloacas.  Crack one egg open and spill around about a teaspoons worth of the white into the sink, put the rest of the egg in a cup, then remove the shell. Crack another egg and spill all of the white into the sink, then add the yolk into the cup with the other egg. Add the vanilla extract and resist the urge to drink the delicious vanilla eggs, you need them for later.

Measure the flour, measure it again, then one more time or more if you feel doubtful, then add the bicarbonate of soda which you shouldn’t eat. Get the salt, realise you have granulated sea salt, then try to crush the granules into smaller and more suitable granules with the back end of a knife in your plastic Tupperware. If most of it gets spring launched out of the tub and all over the floor, just add some more granules to the tub and keep trying! Don’t let the salt win! Add the salt and then you’ve got your salty, chemical flour ready to go too! 

Now to mix it all up! Pour the butter into the lovely sugar and mix it all up with an electric hand mixer, it’s important to scream as you do this because it’s loud and motors are scary. Then add the forbidden custard (egg and vanilla) and mix it all together again with the hand mixer for 2 minutes. Mixing does something or other to the eggs which affects the final cookie, 2 minutes with my hand mixer gives the best results I have found. Less than that and the overconfident eggs get all pushy and make the cookie crumbly and spongy, any more and the eggs are too downtrodden to hold the mix together in the oven and the cookie goes dense and flat. 2 minutes of beating gives well disciplined eggs, yes.

Then add the salty chemical flour. You could add it carefully like everyone says but you don’t have time for that, you want cookies! Chuck the whole load in there and mix it till it goes so dense that your mixer starts to make bad sounds and smell bad. Then use your hands! It feels so bad! So bad on your hands! AHHH! But you must, for cookies! Mix it up, it should be wet enough to stick to your hands a little but dry enough to peel off. I get it perfect every time so I don’t know what to do if yours isn’t like that. Then you need to knead it for 5 minutes, like bread; but not like bread because it’s nothing like bread dough. Just beat it up, fold it and then PUNCH IT, then fold it and PUNCH IT. LOVINGLY! Tell it that you’re doing this for it’s own good and that it hurts you more than hurts it so it knows that it’s it’s own fault for not having enough elastisisy and not because you don’t love it. If you don’t do this then the cookie will not be chewy and then you may as well throw it in the bin. 

Once that’s done, eat 50 grams of the milk chocolate chips and then 50 grams of the dark chocolate chips. Add the remaining chips to the mix and fold them in. Your dough is complete! Now go back to before you started doing anything and preheat the fan assisted oven to 170 C. 

Next get your cookie scoop, realise that you don’t have a cookie scoop, grab a big squidge of dough and make it into a ball about the size of a plumb or one of Tech-Boy’s testicles, put it on some greaseproof paper on a baking tray. I put 6 on the tray because that’s as many as I can fit with space around them for what comes next. I like to tease the balls as I line them up; eluding to the burning fate which awaits them in the oven without outright saying it to them. I don’t think that’s necessary though, I just think it’s fun to bully them before they melt and un-alive. 

Say goodbye like a bond villain and put the little victim balls in the oven for 12 minutes. Set a timer, don’t forget. Then stand at the door and watch them melt, imagine them screaming for help as they flatten then start crying out of guilt for what you’ve just done. When the timer goes off, quickly pull yourself together and take them out. They should still be goo-y and not looked fully cooked. Then leave them on the tray for 5 minutes so they cook that last little bit with the heat they took with them from the oven. Then bite one and burn the inside of your mouth, put the rest on a wire rack to cool and you did it!

Honestly, the cookies are best if you wrap the dough in cling film and keep it in the fridge over night before baking, giving the dough a chance to marinate in the fear of the oven adds extra character to the flavours. ENJOY :3

For a TLDR version that’s a bit more sane:

ALICE’S YUMMY COOKIES (Sane version)

Ingredients:

180g unsalted butter

100g Dark brown soft sugar

150g Light brown soft sugar

100g white granulated sugar

275g plain white flour

1 large egg, room temperature 

1 large egg yolk, room temperature 

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp of bicarbonate of soda

1/2 tsp of sea salt

200g milk chocolate chips

100g dark chocolate chips

Preheat a fan assisted over to 170 C ( google for conversions to your won oven) Brown the butter in a pan over a low heat, allow to cool slightly. Add all the sugars to a bowl, add the browned butter and mix. Remove a teaspoon of the white from the egg and add the remaining egg, the other yolk and the vanilla extract to the bowl, mix for 2 minutes with an electric mixer. Add the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda to the bowl and mix into a thick but easily pliable dough. Knead the dough for 5 minutes Add the chocolate chips and mix till even (Optional)Refrigerate the dough for 24 hours  Place evenly sized balls around 5cm in diameter on baking paper on a backing tray with space between them and back for 12 minutes, remove from the oven and leave on the pan for a further 5 minutes then transfer to a cooling rack.

Anyway anyway, which would you choose to have with a warm glass of milk; a plate of my freshly baked cookies or my thick behind chewy behind?