You'll thank me!

Do you, like me, long for the perfect chocolate chip cookie? But more than just eating the perfect cookie, do you long to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie yourself? Me too sister, and I am here to help.

Italy doesn't really have chocolate chips or really any of the same desserts/treats we have here, so I am forced to take over my own vanilla, brown sugar, and chocolate chips. I had been saving my stuff for a good occasion because my supply was not plentiful. I also wanted to make sure I got the recipe perfect because there was no room for a do over. One of the other girls had tried to make oatmeal raisin cookies that she said tasted delicious, but were in liquid form. This led me to do a little research and I discovered that high altitude recipes really are needed and really do work! (We are in the mountains in Italy.) So when Christmas rolled around last year, I decided this was the moment I had been waiting for, but not without reading website after website about chocolate chip cookies.

I know that probably sounds beyond boring, but I honestly found some awesome and interesting info on this delicious little treat and I wanted to share them with you. I tend to just go ahead and use the Nestle's Tollhouse recipe found on the back of the bag because I've never found a recipe that actually tastes better, yet my cookies always end up flat. It seems that lots of people have this problem. Well, I found this rather ghetto looking website with tons of good tips that I took to heart and ended up making one of my best batches ever. I used the high altitude recipe along with the tip of keeping the dough cold and using several different trays for baking, so you're never using a hot tray. Brills!
I also found this article posted on the New York Times website and I honestly found it really interesting. Once again, it may bore you, but I love bakeries and am constantly wondering how they make their items so delish. This article interviews several bakeries asking what their trick is to such a good cookie and guess what, they all refrigerate the dough for a good amount of time before baking. TA-DAAAA!! Not only do these bakeries do this, the actual recipe for Toll House cookies, at Toll House, use to call for the dough to be refrigerated, but was then left out of the recipe on the back of the bag. I couldn't believe this revelation either!

"And by Ruth Wakefield, it turns out. “At Toll House, we chill this dough overnight,” she wrote in her “Toll House Cook Book” (Little, Brown, 1953). This crucial bit of information is left out of the version of her recipe that Nestlé printed on the back of its baking bars and, since in 1939, on bags of its chocolate morsels."

I ended up making my dough about 36 hours before I baked the cookies and they tasted great. Let me know how your cookies turn out if you should try out any of these tips! And because I tipped you off to such wonderful and useful information, I would really appreciate a box of the cookies. Just saying.......