The Best Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies

May 6, 2016 by thedomesticrebel | 239 Comments

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a girl.

This girl had an aversion to sandals, loved wearing colorful eye shadow and dressed like Penelope Garcia meets a ballerina on the regular.

This girl taught herself everything she needed to know about cooking and baking. In fact, she knew how to sear the perfect chicken breast, season things expertly… even roast a Thanksgiving turkey to golden perfection.

But there was one thing she couldn’t do. Okay, two. Okay, three. One: she could not touch her tongue to her elbow to save her life. But I suppose that’s almost entirely irrelevant because I don’t think there’s ever been a situation in the history of the world where someone’s life depended on whether or not their tongue could touch their elbow, and if there was an incident like this I absolutely need to know about it, but I digress. Two: she could not bake a potato for crap. Every potato that emerged from her oven and/or microwave was as hard as a, well, potato. Her family would chisel into the practically-raw root vegetable with no less than a pound of salt and butter on it to mask the fact that they were practically eating undone potato and then gently say, “it’s good! Just a little underdone” as they crunched into the brown blob.

And three: she couldn’t make a perfect chocolate chip cookie. It’s true. Every recipe she made, her cookies turned out like flat flying saucers, all too crispy and flavorless with nothing remotely soft, chewy or gooey about them. This plagued the young girl because she loved sweets and one of her family’s most requested desserts were cookies.

Spoiler alert: that girl was me. But I’m sure you all figured that out because you are all, I’m assuming, very educated people and because I am a terrible mystery writer.

ANYWAY.

For the longest time, I just couldn’t nail a perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. And then after lots of trial and errors, I found it. I’ve posted the recipe twice before on my site, but I won’t bother linking to them because the pictures are old and crummy and because THIS is truly THE recipe you need.

First, a few takeaways before you make them. Yes, you have to read this.

Please use real butter for this. I know margarine is like, .80 cents a pound. I know a lot of you folks like margarine because Fabio was once a margarine-product’s spokesperson. I get it, Fabio was once hot. But PLEASE, do not use margarine. Use only real butter. Personally, I recommend a butter like Land O’ Lakes European Style Butter, which has a higher butter-fat content and has such an amazing creaminess that regular ol’ sticks lack. Splurge for the good stuff – I urge you!
Next up: instant espresso powder. I promise y’all won’t notice it in the recipe at all. It’s simply there to enhance and deepen the chocolate flavor. One teaspoon is all you need and trust me, it’s phenomenal in this recipe.
Good quality chocolate chips. I get it – the store-brand is cheap. I use the store brand all the time because I am a broke person and splurging on fancily-pronounced name brand chocolate chips cramps my style. BUT, for this recipe I did splurge and used Guittard chocolate – both dark chocolate chips and semi-sweet chocolate chips. The mixture of chocolate chips is decadent and rich – the dark chocolate really deepens everything and the semi-sweet of course, is a classic. You really can tell the difference when you use a higher quality chocolate, so please – indulge yourself! I also really love Callebaut chocolate, too!

And that’s it! Three easy tips – promise! Oh, and one more thing… these cookies are a whopping 2 ounces each. The standard cookie dough scoop is only 1 Tablespoon which is about 1/2 ounce. This scoop is huge! Of course, use what you have or double up so each cookie is about two stacked Tablespoons of dough. Like this:

And whatever you do, MAKE THEM. Treat yo’self!

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4.75 from 56 votes