No Half Measures

25 Sep 2022

This is the story of a person who likes to experiment making cookies for a person who is really quite fine with basic chocolate chip.

I have an amazing cookie recipe that has a secret ingredient: pudding! The pudding keeps the cookies nice and soft, even after you freeze and thaw them.

Ingredients:

• 1 c margarine or butter
• 1/4 c sugar
• 3/4 c brown sugar
• 1 small package instant vanilla pudding
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/4 c flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 c chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Beat butter and sugars until creamy
2. Add vanilla, pudding, and eggs
3. Add flour, baking soda and salt and mix just until combined
4. Mix in chocolate chips until just combined
5. Scoop tablespoon-sized balls onto a lined cookie sheet
6. Bake at 350F for 8-10 minutes or until the edges are starting to brown, rotating halfway through if necessary

When I make cookies, I usually make a quadruple batch. This means I am making somewhere in the range of 130 cookies at a time, and this doesn’t even last more than a couple of weeks in our household.

I usually just make chocolate chip - but every so often, that little thought crosses my mind: what if we did some experiments?

My first idea was to use different flavors of pudding, so I tried chocolate and pistachio. the chocolate cookies with only chocolate pudding come out a light brown, and the chocolate flavor is present but not intense. The pistachio were similar, with a light green color but not much pistachio flavor.

So of course, the next logical step is to replace 2/3 c of the flour with 2/3 c cocoa powder. This gives a much richer chocolate taste and color. You can see the difference between the two chocolate cookies below. You could do white chocolate chips with this, but I almost always go for double chocolate.

I also wanted to try making a classic peanut butter cookie, so I replaced half of the butter with the same amount of peanut butter - in a double batch, that’s 1 c butter and 1 c peanut butter. It took a bit of experimenting to get the ratio right - peanut butter has less fat in it than butter, and so if you put too much peanut butter the dough will be very stiff and the cookies dry when they are done. I added milk until I got a dough consistency that I liked, but you can solve this by underbaking a little bit as well.

Around the holidays, I also wondered if I could make a spice cookie! I used white chocolate chips instead, and added cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves to the dough. You can see those on the right, below.

I actually thought the spice cookies were delightful, almost halfway to a ginger snap.

One valentine’s day I even decided to turn this reciipe into red velvet! I replaced 2/3 c of the flour with 2/3 c of cocoa powder, and then added red food coloring until I was happy with the intensity of the red.

Since the basic recipe for cookies is fairly standard, it’s not too difficult to tweak it from just plain chocolate chip to something different. It would be simple to add other mix-ins, like cranberries or nuts, or to push it further and make a lemon cookie by using lemon pudding, lemon juice and lemon zest, with our without white chocolate chips. Unfortunately (or fortuntately, because it’s much simpler) the main consumer of cookies still prefers chocolate chip. So most of the cookies cooling on my racks will still be the original, reliable recipe.