The Shameful Narcissist cooks??  Sometimes…when I want to eat, don’t want to (can’t afford to) order, and the husband isn’t around :p  This isn’t to say I don’t know how to cook, nor do I dislike doing so, but I’m more interested in the fruits of the labor rather than the labor itself, whereas he’s admitted to enjoying the process.  Also, standing for too long makes me dizzy, which is an irritating reason I don’t normally putter about the kitchen, but I will forgo and endure all of these things around this time of the year to make…

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Damn…looking at this is making me want to make some right now…at midnight…when I have to work in the morning.

You can thank Cupcakes and Machetes for inspiring and reminding me about this, and you should check out her Cookie Day post.  I want those peppermint sugar cookies in my mouth hole.

For my recipe, it’s from my (former though he still works in the same building for the same company just a different department) coworker’s (now) ex-wife who’d make him batches of these and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies to bring in every year around the holidays.  Alas, I don’t know where that pumpkin chocolate chip recipe is, because they were good, too, but this one has become a favorite among my family and IRL friends, and I want to share it with my blogger buddies!

Ingredients

• 3/4 stick Butter Flavored Crisco
• 3/4 cups brown sugar (light or dark, doesn’t matter)
• 2 T milk
• 1 T vanilla extract (if you can, splurge on the real stuff)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 large egg
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 2 c flour
• 1 c chocolate chips (I do half milk half white)

Instructions

Pre-heat the oven to 350 (…maybe 375?  Nah, I’m pretty sure it’s 350, but it might vary depending on your oven.  Oh, you thought this was going to be a precise/I know exactly what the hell I’m talking about recipe?  No…no :D).  While the kitchen is getting toasty warm, you can either set out some cooling racks or brown paper bags if you don’t have the former.  The bags are fantastic for cooling cookies and absorbing some of the excess grease.

Mix the Butter Flavored Crisco (that’s the soft chewy secret.  Also, you cannot save any Crisco until next year.  You have to use it or else it loses its flavor.  Learned that the hard way when I made cookies one year with Crisco I’d kept in the sealed container it comes in.  When I tasted the cookie dough, it was damn near flavorless, and I’d wasted all of those ingredients.  Oops, back to the recipe…) with the brown sugar.  You can use a hand mixer or one of those fancy Kitchen Aids if you have one (my MIL bought me one a few years ago, and I never use it for some reason.  I think because it doesn’t fit on the counter so I’d have to move it, and in my ridiculous brain it just seems easier to pull out the hand mixer.  Wtf is with all the tangents…).  Mix in the milk then the vanilla.  Once all that is mixed, crack open the egg and add that in there, as well.

Now, the recipe I was given would have you separate all of the dry ingredients into another bowl.  You can do that if you want.  I just throw everything together into the one I’m already using, because as much as I’m sort of ambivalent on cooking, I abhor cleaning.  You can of course mix the dry ingredients (salt, baking powder, and flour) together in a separate bowl, slowly adding them into the wet ingredients, or you can do it TSN’s way.

Add the salt and the baking powder.  Mix it up.  Then add the flour about one cup at a time.  You may have to speed up your mixer when the dough becomes thicker.  If you’re feeling really feisty, you could mix all this manually with a spoon.  It’s quite a work out!

Once the dough is mixed, add in the chips (I usually use Ghirardelli, because fuck Nestle.  #sorrynotsorry They were bottling and selling water collected in California during a drought a few years ago.  They also use child slave labor.  Chocolate is a pretty big ethical topic, and I have no idea if Ghirardelli is even ethical…now I’m afraid to google it *groan*).  Like I said above I do half a cup milk chocolate and half a cup white chocolate, but you’re more than welcome to do a full cup of milk chocolate chips (or semi-sweet if milk is too much for you.  Your kitchen, your rules).  I’d advise against doing all white chocolate, as it’s a bit too sweet/candy like.  You can also forgo the chips entirely, and you’ll have a sort of dark sugar cookie.

Exhibit A

After you’ve finished tasting the dough (look I’m aware there’s raw egg in it, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take),

grab a decent sized spoon (or melon-baller is you have one of those), using said utensil to drop the cookie dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet.  I usually get about a dozen  or so on it.  (Oh!  Shit, almost forgot.  You can refrigerate the dough if you want, too.  Actually, if you throw it in the fridge for two hours or so, it’ll be easier to scoop and shape.  Plus I think the cookies will be sturdier.  It’s been a year,  peeps, I really don’t remember.)

Bake for seven minutes.  The recipe said ten, but the bottoms were too brown for my liking.  Seven minutes then pull the cookies out out, but leave them on the sheet.  They’ll actually continue cooking a bit more out of the oven on the warm pan.  They’ll be quite gushy, so attempting to remove them will just smoosh them.  Now if you like less chewy cookies, by all means keep them in the oven longer!  I’d cap the time limit at ten minutes, and for goodness’ sake, make sure you set a timer!  I’ve fallen into THAT trap quite often.  You can mess around with time between 7-10 minutes to see what suits you best.

While the one batch of cookies is warming/cooling on the sheet, load up another and pop it in the oven.  When they come out, you should be able to remove the cookies from the first sheet either with a spatula or a little twist of your fingers.  Put them on the cooling rack or paper bags.  They should be solid enough to move (or eat), and once you’re finished baking, you can transfer them to the container of your choice!

So that’s my chocolate chip cookie recipe.  I hope you weren’t too annoyed by my tangents and randomness.  Let me know if you use this recipe and how it turns out, and of course I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you might have.

Happy Baking and Happy Holidays!