Chocolate-chip cookies, production style

An older gentleman in our church passed away late last week, and his funeral is this Friday (Don is a pallbearer). I was asked to make some chocolate-chip cookies for after the service. Lots of chocolate-chip cookies.

For this task, I took the best chocolate-chip cookie recipe I’ve ever found, and multiplied it. It’s kind of an awkward recipe to multiply, since it starts with 11 tablespoons of butter. I had a full two pounds of butter I wanted to use, so I had to figure out the ratios. A little cross-multiply-and-divide (for those who remember that classic high-school math trick) and I determined the recipe needed to be ramped up by 5.5 times.

I got the original recipe from a now-defunct blog called (oddly) “A Girls’ Guide to Guns and Butter.” The blog is gone, but the recipe lives on. Here’s the original:

• 11 tablespoons butter, melted (hot is fine)
• 2/3 cup light brown sugar (do not pack the brown sugar into the measuring cup but scoop it out gently and simply level it off – it should be loose and fluffy, or you will end up using too much and your cookies will be tough)
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 large egg + 1 egg yolk
• Dash of vanilla
• 2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Here’s my 5.5x calculations, made a bit awkward due to the eggs and yolks:

The secret, apparently, is to melt the butter rather than merely soften the butter.

Brown sugar, white sugar, salt, vanilla, and baking soda:

Adding the whole eggs and egg yolks:

Mixing in the flour and melted butter:

Ready to add the chocolate chips:

This is the first batch. It’s been a long time since I made this recipe, and I swiftly realized the raw cookies have to be much smaller, and more widely spaced, so they don’t all meld together. I reserved the first batch for us; delicious, but not “pretty.”

Thereafter I got the hang of making the cookies “pretty.” The cookies are baked in a low oven (325F) for anywhere from 12 to 16 minutes, depending on oven particulars. I baked and baked, bagging up the cooling cookies, until the dough was gone. (The blue-lidded tub holds the misshapen first batch.)

This really is one of the best chocolate-chip cookie recipe I’ve come across. Just don’t add too much raw dough – or overcrowd it – on the cookie sheet.