best ever chocolate chip cookies

I have a very small confession. This recipe is sort of already up on the blog. I hemmed and hawed about posting this up again (I never just haw. I sometimes hem alone, but haw never gets much use away from hem. Or hee I guess, if you are a donkey), but I think it's worth it. These chocolate chip cookies are from Dorie Greenspan and they are magical. I’m worried that I kind of over-fancied them up in their previous appearance here and that distracted from the fact that these are the best chocolate chip cookies ever. I made the recipe for the blog with blueberries, white chocolate and pistachios, which was a fun dalliance with some alternative flavours, but I just want to emphatically say that with chocolate chips, these are just amazing. They are really spready, which I like, and not at all cakey. They are crispy-caramelly at the edges and soft and chewy in the centre. I always err on the side of a little underbaked - they will set up a bit more as they cool and they MUST have chewy centres. The contrast between the thin, almost lacy outsides and gooey-soft middles is maybe the very best part.

All of this is to saw that Dorie Greenspan is an amazing cookie genius and her chocolate chip cookies are the best ever and all I will ever need chocolate-chip-cookie-wise for the rest of my life. She is also hugely stylish, with excellent glasses-scarf-hair game that comes off as charmingly elfish and I want to borrow her scarves. I have a big cookie-crush! I urge you to peruse her recipes, I have never been disappointed yet.

best ever chocolate chip cookies:

From Baking: From My Home to Yours by way of Food52

• 2 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon salt

• ¾ teaspoon baking soda

• 1 cup butter, at room temperature

• 1 cup sugar

• ⅔ cup brown sugar

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

• 2 large eggs

• 2 cups chocolate chips or chunks (I like combining milk, dark and white chocolate)

• 1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)

• A pinch of flaky salt (optional)

Heat oven to 375F.

Cream sugars and butter in a stand mixer on medium speed until very fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add vanilla and eggs one at a time beating between additions.

Add dry ingredients and beat on low speed until well combined. Scrape the bottom of the bowl to make sure that you incorporate any unmixed flour.

Add chocolate and nuts if using, mix until evenly distributed.

Scoop 2 tablespoon-sized balls of dough onto a parchment lined cookie sheet. Sprinkle a little salt over each ball if desired. Leave plenty of space, these are very spready. Bake 8-10 minutes, take them out before they look completely set.

skillet chocolate chip cookie

It has been real hot lately. Hot for Victoria anyway, our little temperate rainforest with lovely stabilized temperatures where it never gets too hot or too cold. But for me it feels sweltery. I always have the good sense in these moments to do some cooking that requires me to turn my oven on and heat my house into a sticky, muggy nightmare. It’s like a DIY sauna, but with cookies at the end.

In this case, one huge cookie, baked up like a pie in a skillet. And it’s worth the heat to get a slice of warm cookie with slightly melty ice cream. A crispy-edged, warm and slightly gooey-centered salty-sweet slice of cookie.

skillet chocolate chip cookie:

Adapted from Chipits

• 1 cup softened butter
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 cups chocolate chips, I used half milk and half dark chocolate
• Big pinch of flaky salt

Cream together butter and sugars until very light and fluffy, around 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each egg is added. Scrape the bowl well to ensure all ingredients are incorporated. Add flour, salt and baking soda and beat until just incorporated. Add chocolate chips and fold through the dough. Spread cookie dough into an 8 inch skillet and sprinkle flaky salt over the top. Bake at 375F until golden brown on top and just set in the middle, about 30 minutes. Let cool slightly and serve with ice cream.

Cornflake marshmallow chocolate chip cookies

These cookies feel slightly transgressive to me. There is something really satisfying about baking from scratch and then stuffing the baked goods with industrially processed junk food like marshmallows. Maybe I'll follow this one up with a pie made of pop tarts. 

When I first made these cookies I followed the Milk Bar recipe but I couldn't get them to turn out quite right. They were still really good, just not exactly what I wanted. I wanted the cookies to be slightly flattened but not too thin, chewy in the middle with crispy edges and I wanted there to be some discernible chewy marshmallow goo. What I got was thin very spready cookies, crispy throughout with caramelized crunchy marshmallow edges. They were almost florentine-like. 

These were delicious and no cookies went to waste. But I couldn't achieve the chewiness I wanted. I tried under baking them, I tried baking the dough chilled, baking room temperature dough. I fiddled with the oven temperature. Everything I tried produced cookies that were thinner and crispier than I wanted. So I took the whole idea of the cookie, with the marshmallows, cornflakes and chocolate chips, and I stuck it in a different dough altogether. I used the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, which makes softer, thicker cookies.

I still under baked them, because this cookie dough can turn out a little more cakey than I like. Reduced baking time will also help you achieve perfect results with the marshmallows. It is very important to preserve some marshmallow that is melted and chewy but not fully caramelized and brown. These cookies had really deeply caramelized molten marshmallow pools around them and but they also still had white goopy marshmallow on top. The marshmallow exists in two distinct states simultaneously, the superposition of marshmallow. It is allowed to fulfill all of its best possible destinies at once, in one cookie.

cornflake crunch:

adapted from Milk Bar

• 5 cups (6 ounces) cornflakes 

• 1/2 cup milk powder

• 1/4 cup sugar

• 1 teaspoon salt*

• 1/2 cup melted butter

Crunch the cornflakes with your hands into small cornflake rubble. Add milk powder, sugar and salt and toss. Drizzle melted butter over and toss to coat the mix with butter and form small clumps. Spread over a cookie sheet and bake at 275° F until golden brown, about 20 minutes.

cornflake marshmallow chocolate chip cookies: 

adapted from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking

• 2 cups flour

• 1 teaspoon salt*

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

• 1 cup packed dark brown sugar

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar

• 2 large eggs

• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

• 1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips 

• 1 1/2 cups cornflake crunch 

• 1 1/2 cups mini marshmallows

Combine the flour, salt, and baking soda together in a large bowl.

Beat the butter and sugars in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment until smooth and creamy. Add eggs one at a time, scraping the bowl in between.  Add vanilla and beat until just incorporated. 

Add the flour mixture 1/2 cupful time and beat after each addition. Fold in cornflakes, marshmallows and chocolate chips. Scoop the dough using a medium size cookie scoop or hand form medium sized cookie dough balls. Chill dough balls in the fridge for at least 1 hr, up to overnight if you like. 

Bake at 375° F until there are crispy melted pools of marshmallow around the edges and still white marshmallow goo on top. I started checking them after 6 minutes and kept checking every minute or two after that. In my oven they took about 8-10 minutes.

Salt note: I generally use measurements for Diamond Crystal salt. If you are using Mortons or another brand, adjust accordingly - this chart can be helpful.

Photos by Tyrel Hiebert