Today I learned that cookie recipes are the way they are for a reason.
Tonight I really wanted cookies, but I had only self-rising flour instead of all-purpose flour and not quite enough brown sugar. Okay, I could make up for the brown sugar, but what about the self-rising flour? Something would happen, but I wasn’t sure what. Still, I wanted cookies and I wanted them then, so I dumped the self-rising flour in the bowl with less baking soda than the recipe called for.
The lack of baking soda was probably for the best. The cookies turned out to be quite large, but that was just the beginning. They definitely weren’t as sweet as the last batch of cookies I remembered making with the same recipe (Nestle’s Toll House chocolate chip cookies, for the curious–if you follow this recipe you will make delicious cookies), but the consistency was also different. The cookies from this recipe are chewy and sweet. These were more cakelike than cookielike, probably thanks to the different flour. I felt like I should be eating them with icing on top, even though there was no icing in the house. Maybe Nutella? Now there’s something to try.
This is something to keep in mind. When you’re baking something, the recipe is the way it is for a reason. Don’t mess with it too much, self.
5 replies on “This is why you don’t experiment with cookie recipes too much”
But if no one experimented with cookies we wouldn’t have chocolate chip cookies today…
That’s a very good point. But did they mess with the very foundation of the recipe? Okay, they probably did. But did they screw with the flour like I did? 😛
No, just how they added the chocolate. And how does one go wrong with adding chocolate, really? As long as there’s enough of it…
I tend to experiment in very small ways… like using a very dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate or semi-sweet and being picky about the brown sugar I use.
I like experimenting in that way; at least the result will likely still be reasonably tasty. But messing with the flour… that’s risky territory, man.