From almost the moment I woke up, I was on my feet – I had a baking agenda, though I didn’t do everything that I’d planned. I baked three batches of chocolate chip cookies, three different recipes – one a variation – and gingerbread – something that I’ll be sharing next year, since I think it would be off-kilter to post a recipe for such a thing after Christmas. The smell of chocolate chip cookies and gingerbread permeated the house. I hope everyone had a great Christmas, with more than enough food, family and friends, and Christmas cheer all around.
It’s those chocolate chip cookies that I baked that morning that I’m sharing here today. The third batch I’m holding on to a bit longer since I want to play with it a bit more and fine tune it, but I can already say that they’re my Dad’s favourite.
This particular chocolate chip cookie recipe comes from Alton Brown. To be honest, I had hardly a clue about who Alton Brown is – I confess I didn’t even recognize his name – until not too long ago and I’ve since come across a number of blogs singing praises to the heavens about his recipes and how they work. It was while I was researching, once again, the chemistry of chocolate chip cookies that I came across Mr. Brown’s three recipes for chocolate chip cookies. I don’t remember how it happened or started, but lately I’ve been having seemingly an obsession, for lack of a better word, with chocolate chip cookies. I pore over articles about them, including that New York Times article with the thirty-six hour dough that had food bloggers in a frenzy, and study all the varieties that are out there that are inevitably tied to Ruth Wakefield. Sometimes, my interest is not so much in eating them but learning about the chemistry that makes a good chocolate chip cookie. Such personal quests are sometimes a pain since I want to go right down to the very science of it and that can’t always be easily found or answered with a few clicks of a Google search.
Soon enough, I came to find Alton Brown’s recipe for gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. Delving further into this recipe, it turns out that it is adapted from one of his three chocolate chip cookie recipes: the chewy, I believe. I made the cookie dough the night before, on Christmas Eve, and baked them on Christmas morning. They seemed promising, I was hoping I’d be one of the thousands standing and clapping in ovation, but once I tasted one, I wasn’t completely happy. The cookie itself was of a pleasing sturdiness, it was chewy, but all the while as I ate it I thought something was lacking. I became full after just one cookie – that in itself not a bad thing, except that this feeling of being full was not satisfied but ugh, like it was just sitting there.
Most of my gripes seemed to be idiosyncratic, however, as almost everyone else liked them. My aunt loved them – may I tell she ate four in a row? – even to the point of employing one of the oldest tricks in the book: to exclaim and point at something non-existent and, while everyone’s backs are turned, take the last cookie and run. Cheeky!
Start typing “gluten free chocolate chip” into Google and the first search suggestion is “gluten free chocolate chip cookies”. (Second is gluten free chocolate cake.) Maybe I’ve made it obvious in my various comments on different bloggers’ posts, but just in case I haven’t, I like chocolate chip cookies. It’s one of those cookies that seems to always hit the spot and that everyone likes. Some days, I’ll get a hankering for them. In the old days a.k.a. before blogging I would just crave that cookie – sometimes it would pass, other times it would be reciprocated. Nowadays I’m on the Internet, torturing myself with pictures of all kinds of chocolate chip cookies and reading recipes, then driving myself crazy trying to figure out which ones to make with what I already have on hand. Such was the case with these cookies.
