I originally stole the recipe from Smitten Kitchen (love her stuff!) but tweaked it by adding peanuts and peanut butter. She adapted it from one in all recipes, who probably got it somewhere else... When you find a good choc chip cookie recipe, it's good to keep and share it.
It's also got a mini ethics lesson in it! Gosh, cooking AND ethics in one post! No, you don't need to debate the ethics in the comments. Really, you don't.
Also, random factoids and links for the win this post.
I've Australianised (aka, metric!) the measurements.
270G of plain flour - which is just under 2 cups
1/2 teaspoon of bicarb soda
1/2 teaspoon salt (or a bit less depending on your peanut butter, we'll get to this shortly)
170g unsalted butter, melted
225g brown sugar (a cup, pressed down slightly)
112g white sugar (smidge less than 1/2 a cup)
3 teaspoons vanilla essence
1 egg yolk
1 egg
350g dark choc chips (if you're feeling lazy and/or decadent, just put in 2 packets of Cadbury's* choc chips. It's about 460g, but hey, you only live once, right?)
1/2 a jar of pure peanut butter**. 1/2 a jar is approximately 190g, but I just scoop.
if you like, you can also add some peanuts, which I did this time.
Preheat oven to 165C. I have a fan forced oven, you may need to adjust for yours if not.
While your butter is melting in the microwave*** (ok, you can melt it elsewhere, but seriously, who does that nowadays?), sift together the flour, salt and bicarb soda in to a small bowl. By sifting, it not only mixes them together, it gets rid of the lumps, and aerates the flour. You can skip sifting, but I don't offer any guarantees. I prefer using one of the old OLD fashioned sifters, that has the wheel in the middle. More work, but I feel I have the moral superiority edge. See next tip for further moral superiority.
Cream together melted butter (that will have cooled while you were basking in the glow of previous superiority), brown sugar, white sugar. I use a pump whisk (Avanti brand, but they don't seem to sell them any more) so again, moral superiority, because instead of using an electric blender, I'm at least burning SOME energy that I'm sure I'm going to replace by eating cookies... Ahem, back on track. The mixture should be fairly light at this point.
Add in your vanilla essence, egg yolk and egg. I add the egg yolk first, because if the first egg breaks the yolk, I can still add the egg yolk after that. Another thing I do: break the egg in to a small cup before adding to mix. That way if you have to pick out bits of shell because you're really unco when breaking eggs (aka, ME), you're not trying to pick it out of the mix, only the cup.
Stir in your morally sound peanut butter - I'm still using the whisk at this point to make sure I don't get just one huge lump of peanut butter in the mixture.
Fold in the flour mix. At this point I'm swapping to a normal wooden spoon. You don't want to over mix it at this point, or you lose all the air that you've beaten in previously. It should be just mixed.
Add in your choc chips, gently stir them through. If you're adding peanuts, add them now. (I used my trusty mortar and pestle to give a different consistency this time. Before I had a mortar and pestle, I used to wrap the peanuts up in a clean tea towel and hit them with the base of a pot. It's good for getting rid of any pent up aggression, too.)
I use a soup spoon to scoop out the batter. They do have a tendency to spread in the oven, so space them well apart. It usually takes me 2 cookie trays and 2 batches to get them all cooked. I tend to leave about 5cm between cookies.
Bake for 10-15 minutes. Get them out of the oven after the outsides start going brown. Let them cool on the tray for about 5 minutes (this is important if you don't want folded cookies, because they are VERY soft at this point) and then fully cool on racks.
Once cool, pack them up in to Anzac cookie tins, and take to work.
I've also made this recipe and swapped out peanut butter (no peanuts either) for 2 shots of espresso. They looked completely different. It worked, too, but wasn't as popular at work as the peanut butter batch.
*Nestle is the evil empire in my house. Just sayin'.
**You can get this in the health food aisle, Coles sells the Sanitarium one, or you can get it in a health food shop. By buying the 100% peanut butter, it means no salt/sugar, but also means no added oil, which is why I started buying it. What I wasn't aware of until my friend (who is passionate about improving the plight of animals everywhere) told me, is that peanut butter's added oil is usually palm oil, which not only horrifically bad for you, but also for the orangutan habitat. Won't someone think of the orangutans? The only issue for me is that it's not made in Australia, which is something I believe in. Health food store for the win.
*** I read this really cool article online about melting butter and the science behind it and why you use different types of butter (cold, softened, melted etc), and how each one affects the outcome of the dish. Needless to say, I can't find it again.
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