Cooking blog by: Samantha Belcourt
Right before school started, my friend sophomore Brianna Kosuth and I challenged ourselves making a basic recipe more interesting.
First, we took the Nestle Toll House recipe for chocolate chip cookies (an easy favorite), and then made it something it wasn’t.
Here is the original recipe:
Ingredients
- 2 1/4cups all-purpose flour
- 1teaspoon baking soda
- 1teaspoon salt
- 1cup (2 sticks)butter, softened
- 3/4cup granulated sugar
- 3/4cup packed brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs
The result was the sweet smell of burnt and underdone success.
I recommend preheating the oven before sticking in the cookies; and placing each cookie a fair even distance apart because they will stick together. To prevent under done or burnt cookies, I think the key next time would be setting in multiple trays instead of one overloaded tray.
We ended up with around 40 cookies, after using three sticks of butter and five eggs the idea of measuring just seemed mediocre. A pinch of this, a cup of that, you get the jist.
However, that isn’t even the best part, which is in my opinion at least, we were using this recipe as a standard backbone but adding some pretty different things into the cookies to get the flavors we wanted.
Our experiments were adding the following…
- Blueberry jam (my favorite; they’re really moist)
- Nutella and cereal chunks (cereal chunks that weren’t mixed and had risen to the top were very hard to chew from being burnt, but the nutella was consistently amazing)
- Peppermint & chocolate chips (the perfect christmas cookie)
- Triple chocolate (the unsweetened bakers chocolate bites were a bitter shock; so much so the other two chocoaltes were virtually tastless)
- Nutella, cereal and cinnamon (the cinnamon in this one was over used so much you could not taste the nutella consistently, but the cereal pieces in this cookie were surprisingly soft: I would edit this recipe in the future)
- Cinnamon overload (this cookie was delicious, next time I would keep a glass of something nearby, because after or while I am consuming the cookie, it has a bite)
- Maple & cinnamon ( The maple I belive may be what made the cookie spread to take on the form of a madeline instead of yourtypical cookie: regardless, the cinnamon wasn’t strong)
- Chocolate chunk & blueberry jam (a roller coaster for the tastebuds. I would almost recommend a more subtle jam with so much chocolate)
- Peanut butter & coco powder (there is nothing to say about this cookie besides: you must try it)
- A ton of cinnamon & hint of nutella (this was disappointing, because the nutella could not be tasted in the cookie and the cinnamon unevenly spread throughout the cookie, making each bite a guessing game)
- Jam & cereal (the perfect breakfast cookie the jam patants the hardness of thecereal chunks just right)
- Cinnamon & chocolate (unexpectedly the chocolate overpowered the cinnamon and not the other way around this cookie turned out decent but next time: I’d add more cinnamon)
- Plain cookie (they don’t taste like they sound, since they were in the back of the oven. It is my theory that the taste came from the oven aroma or from being in the same mixing bowl as other trials)
- Peppermint & peanut butter (ghastly)
- Jam & chocolate (the difference between this cookie and the jam and chocolate chunk cookie is this chocolate is melted and/or powder form.. the results were opposite; the chunk cookie set up more and was easier to hold while this one pretty much broke into a jig saw puzzle even with the most delicate of hands)
- Extra vanilla (could not taste a difference: next time I’ll use even more vanilla)
- Peanut butter (never disappoints, but oddly these cookies turned out smaller then the rest: they shrivled instead of expanding, and became hard and crumbly in about two days while the other cookies stayed good for a bit longer, but of course didn’t make it to there full life expectancy because they were consumed)
- Chocolate chip (after eating all of these different flavors the chocolate chip was a huge let down, next time more chcooalte chips try strategically placing them so they aren’t all clumped in one spot)
- Brown sugar cookie (tasted a lot like the plain cookie, imagine freezer burn taste but with a cookie and its from the oven: next time use way more brown sugar and mix more thoroughly)
- Lemon cookie (underdone,the cookie flattened out like a madeline which I belive is because of the liquid: not so much lemon in the future, tasted tart but not like lemon at all)
- Black cherry lemonade and chocolate chips (this turned out underdone like above, and flattened out like a madeline. Maybe it’s a lemon thing. This cookie was odd: fruit mixed with sweet; even after the mix was stirred the liquid still rose to the top.)
Needless to say, a good majority of the cookies were either tasteless or had a taste that was difficult to put into words…
However, my friend and I both firmly agree, if you try any of these ideas with the basic recipe and just tweak and adjust measurements, heating time, stirring amount etc. fixing the taste of the cookie is possible with ought changing the main flavor(s).
A few that I strongly recommend are the cinnamon cookie (keep a glass of milk or water near by), and the peppermint and chocolate chip cookie is unique and defiantly has a bite to it. My personal favorite was the Jam Cookie, but remember to keep a napkin nearby for this crumbly treat. Okay I was very disappointed in the lemon cookie, the texture turned more like a Madeline cookie consistency and the extract was inconsistent between bites… we figured out later this was probably because we had mixed two batters together.. (one stirred more then the other)
Happy cooking!