Okay so I had this brilliant idea (or it seemed so at the time) to write a light, fun blog post with my girl Brooke. The premise of the post was that we’d each bake something, and then give it our review. She’s an amazing baker, whereas I only bake when I really really need to – which means I mostly bake banana bread. That means I make a killer banana bread, haha, whereas Brooke makes killer banana bread, cakes, cookies, bars, and even salty sweet popcorns.
So we debated recipes and landed on making Brooke’s favorite lemon brownies. Yes, brownies but they are not chocolate – they are lemon. I was all in, until I stumbled on this recipe for Pan-Banging Chocolate Chip cookies.
We should have made those lemon brownies ^^. Instead we quickly swapped the lemon brownies for cookies because the promise of a perfect chocolate chip cookie with ripples, crisp buttery bottoms, and soft centers was too powerful to resist. Honestly, I was going to make BOTH recipes, but life got in the way. Read on!
Brooke: Spoiler alert! I did make both!
Emily: Yes you did! Okay, girl – when did you discover your love for baking?
Brooke: I think it really hit after my son was born. I had gone down to part time & had lost myself a little (a lot) in raising my first child. I was feeling untethered & aimless & somehow got it into my head to bake a weekly treat for my coworkers. After the first few were so successful, I doubled down. I decided that I would challenge myself to make a NEW treat every week. For a year. And by golly, I did it!
Emily: Did the baking help you to feel better?
Brooke: Yes! It definitely gave me something new to focus & work on. It gave me a sense of purpose & the adulation of my coworkers didn’t hurt either. Extra bonus was sampling the goodies myself.
Emily: I feel like you still use baking as therapy – and I wish I was your next door neighbor so I could benefit from all of it.
The Cookies
Emily: I realize that the point of testing out a recipe is probably to follow the exact recipe with precision. But the recipe called for bittersweet chocolate and neither of us really likes bittersweet chocolate.
Brooke: I mean, I like bittersweet, but I don’t love it. Generally. I mean, there are some times when I’m really jonesing for a strong, bitter, dark chocolate, but honestly, I’m more of a creamy milk chocolate gal.
Emily: I am most definitely a milk chocolate woman. I can handle dark chocolate if it’s sweet enough, but the really really dark chocolate just tastes dry and sad to me, as if I’m eating chocolate dirt.
Also, it seemed like a crime to ONLY PUT 6 ounces of chocolate into these cookies, so I cheated and put in a full (12 oz) bag of Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chips. Otherwise I followed the recipe precisely (haha!). It called for water, which had me scratching my head.
Brooke: I opted to go a little chichi & instead did 8 oz. of Ghirardelli semi sweet chocolate (2 baking bars, actually). I like a chopped bar because the pieces aren’t uniform. And it makes me feel fancy.
Emily: Nice! You followed the recipe more closely than I did in that way. But alas, you didn’t love the cookies, when all was said and baked.
Brooke: Turns out my family has more specific chocolate chip cookie requirements; who knew that was a thing?! While these were tasty, I don’t think the end product justified the work involved.
Brooke: I banged the pan every two minutes or so, allowing a total baking time of maybe 13-15 minutes. Given that I was only baking 8 at a time (I used a ginormous ⅔ sheet pan), the going was relatively slow & tedious. The result was a disappointingly, mostly flat cookie with few ripples. To me, these were not chewy at all, but definitely more of a crispy cookie with a very greasy feel (which is weird because I’m definitely in the “Butter makes it better!” camp).
Emily: I apparently have the sense of humor of a 13 year old, because every time I type that I banged the pan, or read that you banged your pan, I snicker. I won’t even show ya’ll my cookie balls, because they were sad. Here they are, in the oven:
Emily: Anyhoo, we really enjoyed the cookies, but my family is in the ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ category. Around here, a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie is celebrated for its mere existence. I have three leftover cookie dough balls in the freezer for when we need a quick fix.
Brooke: Don’t get me wrong. These certainly got eaten, but they lasted a few days as opposed to just one & I didn’t bother freezing any. I do like your idea of freezing the dough for cookies-on-demand. That is both genius & dangerous!.
Emily: The freezing of cookie dough balls for cookies on demand has been a practice I have used for years – mostly because I really have zero interest in eating day-old cookies. Same-day, right out of the oven cookies is where it’s at.
Cookie corn with a ‘p.’
