Today is not a very nice day. It is dark, dreary, windy, rainy, and cold (well, colder than I'd like it to be). As if nature hadn't ruined this day enough, it decided to start throwing a temper tantrum at about 3am that was so loud it shook the house and woke me up with some seriously spooky sounds.
And so as a result of all this craziness I decided to do one thing I know that almost always makes me feel better: bake something. It has been far too long. Since I was feeling extra tired I knew it would have to be a recipe requiring minimal effort on my part. I found the perfect one thanks to my Twitter friend Russel van Kraayenberg (@rvank) of the wonderful dessert blog Chasing Delicious.
The Classics: Chocolate Chip Cookies | Chasing Delicious
I followed that recipe to a T and the result was some cookies that were pretty delicious, but not perfect, on account of a few mistakes I made:
- I used a coarser grain of salt, which means that the salty taste of the batter is pretty obvious and overpowering and lingers in your mouth after swallowing the yummy cookie you just ate. Not good. Next time in a recipe like this I'll use my salt grinder as it puts out some pretty powdery salt. Not sure what I was thinking there. Was probably not thinking.
- I preheated my oven as I was starting the recipe, when I should have done it closer to the end. My butter was too hard and so I wanted to get some heat into the ceramic mixing bowl I was using to help facilitate the softening and mixing or the butter and sugar. Result: oven was closer to 425C than 375C and the edges of my cookies were already a really dark brown 3 minutes into the baking time. Woops. They ended up only staying in there about 7 minutes for the first batch, 9 minutes for the second after letting the oven cool off a bit. Both batches were pretty dark, but thankfully not burnt.
- Not enough chocolate. I only had about 1/8 cup of chocolate chips, and about 2.5 squares of dark chocolate left over from one of those large thin slabs of 70% cocoa bars. Luckily this was a pretty small batch of cookies, so every cookie has at least a few chunks of chocolate, but... still not enough for my liking. But hey, that's impromptu baking for you.
And so a last-minute baking adventure was pretty much a success. These cookies should last me a little while... like until tomorrow. Happy baking!
