Why Reinvent the Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookie?

Chocolate Chip Cookies Using Only Brown Sugar

I have often wondered why there are so many different variations of chocolate chip cookies.  After some considerable thought, I have come up with a simple answer.  Bakers don’t like to leave well enough alone. 

I grew up on chocolate chip cookies.  It was the one dessert my mother prepared flawlessly.  She never told me where she got the recipe, but I imagine it came from the back of a package of chocolate chips.  

The ingredients are simple: butter, flour, sugar, brown sugar, egg, vanilla extract, baking powder, baking soda, salt and chocolate chips.

Back in 1938, when Ruth Graves Wakefield invented this recipe, she was simply looking for a new dessert to serve at her small hotel, The Tollhouse Inn, located about 20 miles outside Boston.  At that time there were no such things as chocolate chips.

Wakefield decided to add some chocolate to a cookie recipe she already used regularly, so she chopped up a NESTLÉ® semi-sweet chocolate bar.

Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies, as she called them, became an instant classic.  In 1941, NESTLÉ introduced TOLL HOUSE® Real Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels to speed the cookie-making process.

Eventually home bakers began creating their own versions of Chocolate Chip Cookies.  They eliminated white sugar and replaced it with extra brown sugar or they changed the baking temperature or the size of the cookies or they transformed the dough into brownies.  I’ve done that and called the end result Chocolate Chip Squares. 

Others added tablespoons of coffee powder, cinnamon, cocoa, oatmeal, tahini, corn syrup, milk, peanut butter or actual peanuts or they sprinkled salt crystals on top before baking.  

Some recipes even called for small chunks of semi-sweet chocolate.  Why save yourself some labor by using pre-made chocolate chips when you could potentially injure yourself hacking up solid chocolate?

Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes have gotten a little ridiculous.  Do you really need both cake flour and bread flour as ingredients?  That’s what all-purpose flour is for.

Or consider a recently published recipe for Giant Crinkled Chocolate Chip Cookies, which uses 1/3 cup batter per cookie.  The directions say to bang the baking sheet containing still-baking cookies onto the oven rack every 3 minutes so the centers won’t puff up.  Do I really want to grab a very hot baking sheet and smash it against another surface—not just once but 3 or 4 times?

Somewhere along the way the idea of refrigerating the cookie dough for several hours or overnight also became popular—dragging out the preparation time.  No more spontaneous baking!  You’ve got a schedule to keep.

My mother may not have excelled at cooking, but she knew how to make a batch of great-tasting Chocolate Chip Cookies.  Here’s her recipe.

Traditional Chocolate Chip Cookies

Traditional Chocolate Chip Cookies – makes about 36 cookies (adapted from “Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen!”)  

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened to room temperature + more for greasing

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 1/4 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups (12-ounce package) semi-sweet chocolate chips 

Place one of the oven racks in the middle position and preheat the oven to 375 degrees. 

Mix the butter with the two sugars in a mixing bowl or a food processor until well blended.  Add the egg and vanilla and mix again. 

Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and mix until well blended.  Add the chocolate chips and mix thoroughly.  

Lightly rub 1 or 2 baking sheets with butter or use silicone baking mats or parchment paper   to keep the cookies from sticking.  Drop 12 small spoonfuls of cookie dough on each sheet, 3 cookies per row in 4 rows.  Bake each sheet, one at a time, for 8-10 minutes.  The cookies will be brown but not dark brown.  They will look not quite done, but by the time they look done on the top they’ve burned on the bottom.  

After you remove the baked cookies from the oven, let them cool on the sheet for 3 minutes.  Then transfer them with a metal spatula to a cooling rack.  Repeat until all the dough has been used up. 

Store the cookies in a tightly covered container.

                         For more recipes, order "Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen!"