Cakes to cookies

I’m going slowly as I continue my hunt for the perfect yellow cake.

For now, I’m turning from cakes to cookies. Chocolate cookies to be exact. I’ve tried the world peace cookies and I love them, but only when they are very thin and soft.

What I would like, is a chocolate cookie that can stand beside a chocolate chip cookie and hold its own.

I recently tried a contender from Martha Stewart’s Cookies.

As I was getting the ingredients mis en place, I kept rechecking the recipe and thinking “1 ½ cups? That’s an awful lot of sugar. Am I reading that right?”

The recipe also had me working with melted butter. A technique, you may recall, that I am not yet comfortable with.

After mixing it all up, I baked two batches and froze the third. First batch was baked for 15 minutes. Second batch, for 11.

The first batch came out a bit more crackled on top than I like, and it was too crunchy. That’s why the second batch had a shorter baking time.

The second batch were smoother on top, but they still had a bit of crunch on the outside. The inside was softer but …

You see, when I began this recipe, I was hoping for a soft chewy cookie, throughout and all around.

So at this point I have a couple of choices.

One, I can tweak the original and see if that helps. Maybe add more sugar, (uh, no) more vanilla, or more butter. Or maybe use butter flavored shortening instead of butter. That would probably be my best bet, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing to the shortening what I did to the butter. I’d prefer to cream it. For me, this option would mean an entire recipe rewrite and I’m not sure its worth it.

Or two, I can take the parts of this recipe that I like and use them to transform my chocolate chip cookies into chocolate chocolate chip cookies.

Not really sure what I’ll do, but I’m leaning toward the latter.