One Day I will Conquer the Chocolate Chip Cookie (and No, This is Not About Dieting!)

Baking the perfect chocolate chip cookies is the bane of my entire existence.  Okay, perhaps that's a bit melodramatic, but seriously!  I cannot bake a good HOME-MADE chocolate chip cookie to save my life!

I consider myself to be a pretty decent cook.  I love to try new things, cook new things, and peruse Pinterest for new and exotic recipes to try.  I can bake a mean Perfectly Chocolate Chocolate Cake, for example, with home-made chocolate frosting and everything.  It's one of my chocolate-loving husband's favorite desserts.  I cannot, however, bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

I recently came across this picture of different chocolate chip cookies, all cooked with different amounts of each ingredient, along with a brief description of what went wrong.  This is serious stuff - this article  dives into the science of baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie, tailored to what YOU think the perfect chocolate chip cookie is.

Here is the graphic:

(www.ozy.com)

I have baked every chocolate chip cookie in this picture, with none of them turning out the way I want.  If my family wants a really good chocolate chip cookie, I go to the store and purchase a family roll of Pillsbury Chocolate Chip Cookie dough (not the pre-cut kind, but the actual roll), roll the dough into little balls, and bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

Anyway, back to the home-made kind.  I found this recipe on Pinterest called the Best Ever Chocolate Chip Cookie.  The name alone gave me hope, as this is exactly what I've been looking for my entire baking life!  Looking over the recipe, it sounded pretty good, but needed a few tweaks.

With guidance from the website above, I once again set out to bake the perfect home-made Chocolate Chip Cookie, with the help of my little bakers-in-training.  I followed the recipe for the most part, but added extra flour, a little extra vanilla to reduce the over-floury taste, and then refrigerated the dough before baking it.

Once the dough was mixed and well-chilled, I was a little worried because the dough was very flaky.  But, still I held out hope.  I like a round cookie, so I spooned dough into my hands, rolled it into little balls, and placed them on the baking pan.  I knew the dough wouldn't spread much because the butter had set in the fridge, but I wasn't worried - I had this scientific website, dangit!

After baking my cookies for 10 minutes, I took them out of the oven.  Well, they weren't exactly - perfect. They were still in the exact same little balls I had rolled the dough into. They hadn't spread at all!  I took a metal spoon and smashed them out into a cookie shape, but in doing so, the chocolate chips smashed and spread all over the cookie.

Okay, so they weren't pretty, but I had hopes of them tasting great!

Audrey loved them of course!  (Kellen doesn't like cookies much, so he didn't taste.)   My main taste-tester - my husband - lovingly told me they tasted a little floury, but were much less cake-y than the last ones I baked.   I agreed.

While the cookies tasted okay, they still weren't exactly what I was hoping for.   They were alright, but not perfect.

I still have hopes of one day baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie.  Until then, I'll continue to test, fail, and test again.

Yet another failed attempt at chocolate chip cookies.  Do you think this qualifies as a Pinstrosity??

I WILL, ONE DAY, CONQUER THE HOME-MADE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE!