As of Monday, I have finally mastered chocolate chip cookies. That is to say, I finally made chocolate chip cookies, from scratch, that came out plump and chewy the way my mom's always do, instead of flat and crunchy the way mine always have.
I'm not much of a cook, really. I mean, I'm not the type of person who can throw together a pinch of this, a daub of that, and invent a wonderful new dish. I don't have innate culinary talent. But I do subscribe to the adage "If you can read, you can cook" and as long as I have a recipe, things I make usually don't turn out half bad.
In the case of chocolate chip cookies, however, I believe the Nestle Tollhouse cookie recipe is inherently flawed. Every time I made them, following the directions to the letter, I always got flat, crunchy cookies. Yet my mom, who always claimed this is the recipe she uses, always has hers come out perfectly. Aha, the flaw in my logic: Mom doesn't actually use a recipe. Her cookies are based on the Nestle Tollhouse recipe, but she has made them so many times by now that she pretty much just eyeballs it. And when you eyeball it, you may not realize that, say, you actually add just a bit more flour than the recipe calls for.
(Now that I have figured this out, I must remember to add the corrected amount into my recipe book, for future reference.)
Whenever it was that I decided I would not be able to be a proper newlywed without a Kitchenaid mixer, I think in the back of my mind I did have doubts as to whether I would actually use it. "Do you bake a lot?" my aunts asked me when I mentioned that was what I really hoped for. "No," I admitted. "I like to bake, but it just takes me so darn long to mix by hand that I don't do it as often as I'd like. But with the mixer..." Is that really true? Would I really bake more if I had this expensive appliance sitting on my counter?
As it turns out, the answer is happily yes. I got the beautiful mixer as a wedding gift just as I hoped, and the week after my honeymoon I tried it out for the first time. The machine did the mixing while I measured out the next ingredient, not to mention the fact that it did a better job of mixing than my poor weak arm ever did. In no time at all I was pulling the most beautiful pound cake I've ever made out of the oven. Amazing! I regaled family members with my incredulity.
Maybe I haven't baked a lot in the past four months, but definitely more than in the past year. And I have to say, I liked being the wife pulling fresh, hot, perfect chocolate chip cookies out of the oven on Monday evening when my husband got home. As long as I've got my mixer and my cookbooks, we may be gaining a lot of weight in the coming years. ;-)