The American Chocolate Chip Cookie was invented by a lady Ruth Wakefield. She was preparing Butter Drop Do cookies and found herself out of baker’s chocolate and took a Nestle piece of chocolate which she chopped into small pieces. Baker’s chocolate melts completely but the finely chopped chocolate remained in small pieces in the dough and so the biscuit was born.
Because Ruth Wakefield had used Nestle chocolate for this recipe, she made an agreement with Nestle. She would get free chocolate for her life, and Nestle was allowed to print her recipe for the cookie on their packaging. This is the recipe as I got it from a friend here in the US:
Necessities
- 550 grams of flour
- 1 teaspoon of baking powder
- 1 teaspoon of salt
- 250 grams of butter (spreadable from the fridge)
- 180 grams of sugar
- 180 grams of brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs
- 350 grams of black chocolate in small pieces
Preparation
- Heat the oven to 190 degrees.
- In a bowl, mix the flour with the baking powder and salt. In a larger bowl, beat the butter with the sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract until creamy. Feed the eggs 1 by 1 and whisk the mixture firmly after each egg. Then you add the flour little by little. Finally add the chocolate pieces, here in America the chocolate chips are sold in bags in the supermarket. If they are not yet available in the Netherlands, use the old way and chop a bar of chocolate into pieces.
- Using a spoon, scoop rounds of dough onto a non-stick baking tray (this should not be greased). Leave enough space between each pile of dough because they will run out a bit during baking.
- Bake for 8-11 minutes or until golden brown take the cookies out of the oven and let them cool down on the baking tray for 2 minutes, then place them on cooling racks and let cool completely.
Variations on the classic Chocolate Chip Cookie
- For a variation on this recipe you can also add pieces of hazelnut, almond or pistachio nuts (here the macademia nut is currently very popular in recipes) or replace the chocolate pieces with mini M & M’s
- Also very popular is pouring the dough into a smaller baking dish so that it forms 1 large rectangle of 1.5 to 2 cm thick and immediately when you remove the dough from the oven cut into strips of for example 8 cm by 2 cm with a sharp pointed knife. you get what they call cookie bars here.
- Lover with the children, Bake the chocolate chip cookies larger than normal, let them cool down, take 2 cookies and turn them bottom side up, put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top and cover with the other cookie. Press lightly so that the ice cream divides between both cookies. Success guaranteed.