I first sampled this delectable cookie on the end of semester field trip with my vertebrate class. Imagine eight full-grown college students and one extremely competitive professor constantly scanning the horizon for any animal possessing a spine. As we prepared for the day, we assumed our biologist personas and crammed ourselves in a large white van – one comparable to the vehicles that transport prisoners or construction workers – while our leader, a famed herpetologist, spewed phrases such as, “I can’t share the road with you if you can’t drive.” A dead opossum on the side of the road drew shrieks of excitement (another species!) rather than the usual revulsion. This final field trip was a competition – an end of semester trial, where only one van could emerge as the superior vertebrate observer. From the moment we entered the van, it was on.
The circumstances of this trip, in all their nerdy glory, do not lend themselves to proper eating and food enjoyment, which is precisely why these cookies deserve the highest of praise. The occupants of our van spent as much time lauding these cookies as we did searching for vertebrates (which, in hindsight, might be one of the reasons that we placed third out of three in the competition). The supplier of the baked goods, one of my dedicated carpoolmates, provided us with an inordinate amount of cookies. We ate them for the entire day – on average each member of the group consumed at least 10 cookies, in addition to other less worthy snacks. The after effects of our heightened consumption of butter and sugar were observed after we arrived at our final destination. The students in the other vans stared in rapt fascination as we guffawed at minimally humorous occurrences and stumbled about with crumbs clinging to our North Face jackets. There was no doubt we experienced the highest of sugar highs. It was, without a doubt, one of the best days of the class.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from nik’s fantastic recipe
This recipe makes an extravagant number of cookies – about 5 dozen. Thus, the end product necessitates sharing. Luckily, sharing makes the eating experience more enjoyable, so you should have already planned on engaging in it. The only recipe alteration I made was to add cinnamon to the cookies. It adds a hint of spice and balances with the semi-sweet chocolate nicely. Lastly, I only wish I could take credit for the witty and science-related comments that dot the recipe, but those were all Nik’s.
Ingredients
2 sticks of butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
2 1⁄2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
16 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
Put butter on counter long enough to reach room temperature. You’re gonna want it soft. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Combine white sugar, brown sugar, and cinnamon in a medium-sized mixing bowl. Stir with a fork, breaking up any clumps, into a nice uniform color. Put the butter in a large mixing bowl. Mush it up with a fork until it has a creamy consistency. You’re good when it starts to look like cake frosting. Add the sugar combo to the butter and beat with a handheld mixer until light and smooth (the dough, not you). Again, you’re looking for a uniform consistency. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour and the baking soda. Slowly add the flour and soda combo to the dough, beating the dough intermittently. I find the dough tends to get very dry, but then magically gets sticky again. So just keep beating until uniformly sticky (again, the dough, not you). Add the chocolate chips. You don’t want them clumped together in their natal group, so beat just long enough to get the chips to disperse, but not so long that you break their will to mingle with the dough. Put parchment paper over a cookie sheet. Drop 12 small clumps of dough on the parchment paper without rolling them into tight little balls. These are free spirited cookies and will not be confined to the rigid conformity of their father’s 9 to 5 automaton cookie factory! Your cookie dough has read too much Proust. Bake for 9 minutes. The cookies will look smooth and rounded when you take them out of the oven. Allow to cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes. The cookies will fall into thinner and more wrinkly cookies as they cool. Transfer cookies to a cooling rack. The recipe normally produces 50-60 cookies in a batch. Such a high number of progeny is typical of r-selected recipes, who must compete in an unstable environment and are under the constant threat of predation. Remember to share.
