Recipe: Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Posted by spots (Singapore, Singapore) on 13 July 2004 in Food & Cuisine and Portfolio.

I received several requests for this cookie recipe, so decided to share it with all. Baked them on my birthday, when I took leave from work and found myself idling away at home, and must say, am quite pleased with the result. They are sweet, yet not too sweet, with a nice buttery, but not oily aftertaste. A few notes to share: first of all, these are dropped cookies. The significance of this did not quite hit me during the first batch. You see, I did not realise that dropped cookies tend to expand in size in the oven. They kinda move from being odd squiggly shaped lumps to being expanded perfect rounds due to the heat. I had placed them too close to each other, not knowing they would "grow". The result was that my dropped cookies expanded into each other and became a veritable pan of cookies, right before my horrified eyes. Well, to salvage the situation, I cut the "pan of cookie" into smaller squares and served them to people as unique cookie squares (think I managed to fool them that I had intended for them to be square all along!). I am happy to report that this debacle did not actually end up compromising the taste of the cookies, i.e., cookies round or square taste equally delish!

Chocolate Chunk Biscuits from The Complete Book of Home Baking by Heilie Pienaar

200g butter or margarine

100g caster sugar *

65g light brown sugar

2 large eggs **

1 tsp vanilla essence ***

250g self-raising flour ****

150g dark chocolate, coarsely chopped *****

* I skimped a bit on the sugar as generally speaking, I find westerners have a sweet tooth and western recipes tend to over-state their sugar amounts.

** I couldn't find LARGE eggs so just settled for normal-sized eggs. Of course, I stuck to the tried-and-tested Seng Choon eggs, which actually do produce a yellower texture in other kinds of desserts.

***I am a personal fan of vanilla essence, so naturally, I added 2 tsp, instead of one.

****Have to admit, after adding the flour, the mixture still looked rather "liquidy", so, I did add in about two dashes more. Thankfully, the cookies turned out fine - not too dry, still very moist indeed!

*****This was a fine opportunity for me to get rid of all the half-eaten chocolate bars in my fridge (so as to prevent my lovely husband from snacking on them!). I used Cadbury's Fruit and Nut, Lindt as well as some random liquered chocolate. I think it doesn't matter how much chocolate you use - so long as visually, it looks as if each cookie will have a substantial but not overwhelming amount of chunks in it. Once again, it's personal taste. If you'd like to add more, I would advise to reduce the sugar amount by just a bit, so as not to make the overall product too sweet.

^One last piece of advice - cookies sometimes suffer from an oily aftertaste. I suspect that this is because the butter in the mixture begins to melt during the preparation stage or while waiting for the earlier batch to bake in the oven. To prevent this from happening, place the mixture in the fridge anytime you suspect your butter is melting. For me, I had to do this once or twice during preparation stage, because I'm such a slow poke at mixing things. And while waiting for the earlier batches to bake in the over, I dumped the mixture in the fridge too. Try it! And now onto the recipe...

1. Cream the butter and both sugars together. Add eggs and vanilla essence and beat well until light and fluffy.

2. Sift flour and add, mixing well. Stir in chocolate chunks.

3. Drop teaspoonfuls onto a greased baking tray and bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees C for 10-12 minutes

4. Remove biscuits and place on a wire rack to cool.