Chocolate Chip Cookies

Tomorrow night I am hosting a jewelry party for a friend and needed a quick dessert option to serve with my wine & cheese themed menu.  In browsing the choices from Ad Hoc at Home (I seriously can't believe I am making two desserts in a row), I selected the Chocolate Chip recipe. 

The recipe write up touts these cookies as "arguably the best cookie ever."  High expectations have been set so I was anxious to see how mine turned out.  As you read in my previous post, I am not a Betty Crocker when it comes to baking but even with my mad baking skills, I was hoping to at least turn out a cookie that was "good."

While shopping for the ingredients, I was excited to pour over the different brands of Godiva chocolate that I could choose from.  The recipe calls for half 70% chocolate and half 55% chocolate.  The higher the percentage a bar of chocolate has means the less sugar it has.  Your darker, typically more bitter, chocolate would be a higher percentage while a milk chocolate bar would have a much lower percentage.  I am not a huge fan of most chocolate but I do love dark chocolate and this recipe called for half of the chocolate to be 70% which is pretty dark.  It was so tempting to snack on the 70% bar of Godiva on the way home from the grocery store but I held out for the sake of the cookie.

The cookie dough was relatively easy to make.  I chopped the chocolate in my food processor and mixed up the dough in my stand alone mixer.  This is what the dough looked like before rolling into balls to prepare for baking.

The dough was a lot more moist and sticky than most cookie dough I have worked with.  My attempt at rolling  the dough into small balls turned out to look more like globs but I baked the cookies the recommended time and they turned out to be pretty tasty.

While I was sold on the taste after trying it warm with a glass of milk, I will acknowledge that my cookies' appearances could have used some work.  The globs of dough baked into many different shapes & sizes but let's just say that adds character.  The finished cookie...

I have kind of cheated so far on the project by cooking two of the easier desserts listed but I am happy to report I will be cooking not baking for the next post.  Be on the lookout for Buttermilk Fried Chicken and Creamed Summer Corn.   I have been working on organizing the recipes from the book and listing out the ingredients that will be more difficult for me to find so I can be on the lookout at my monthly trips to Whole Foods or Fresh Market.  I am enjoying this project so far.  It's fun to document the recipe progress and take pictures.    No readers yet but maybe soon!