There’s a trick to making chocolate chip cookies. They are delightful. I make them in a pan, like brownies. They are soft and thick and gooey. It is my most requested dessert and I make them at least once a week. I can quadruple the recipe in my head and pull out my ginormous stainless steel bowl (big enough to bathe a baby in, my mom would say) and use 8 cups of flour, 4 cups of shortening, 3 cups each of white and brown sugar, 4 tsp vanilla, 8 eggs, 2 bags of good quality chocolate chips. I will bake a couple of batches and freeze a couple to send as gifts or when Clint wants dessert and I’m in a hurry.
I know I’m not supposed to eat the raw cookie dough, but do anyway. There is a sweet science, the creaming of shortening and sugar…watching it get lighter in color and fluff around the beaters. I think of times past when I first made these cookies, Bobbie and I in so many kitchens of so many rent houses. Mom at work, her job as a surgical nurse keeping a roof over our heads. Bobbie and I in the kitchen, singing old hymns…me belting out the lead, Bobbie with her low alto. Once, we accidentally doubled the sugar and made a dark brown, shiny, chocolate chip brittle. It was disgusting and wonderful.
We bought the ingredients for our cookies with food stamps..the old ones that looked like Monopoly money. They came in a booklet and we would carefully tear them out. Mom had a hard and fast rule. We could NOT buy junk food of ANY kind with food stamps. We could BUY the stuff to MAKE junk food. She would say “that’s not free! that’s somebody’s money! I wouldn’t let you buy garbage with real money, I’m not doing it with food stamps!” even if she wasn’t with us, we never broke this rule. I once was at the store with a friend of mine who was going to use food stamps to buy a small carton of Haagen Dazs ice cream. I, at the ripe old age of 16, shamed him until he picked out a larger, less expensive brand. Do people do that today? I wonder. Do they care it’s someone’s money?
I mix the dough and think of this. Me, a miniature, big haired, 16 year old conservative, firmly believing in fiscal responsibility. Me, with no money, just a book of play money. Someone else’s money, feeding me. I inhale the smell of vanilla. I think heaven will smell of vanilla. I crack eggs one handed into my big bowl, making the dough more substantial, adding a yellow richness. Slowly adding the flour, making a fine dusting on the counter when I start the mixer. I think of a time I made chocolate chip cookies when my world had just changed. For the worse? For the better? I am not sure, even now in my age and I mix the dough, the mixer lagging a bit at the thickness. I talk to Bobbie at times about this day, when we were baking and living in a house our parents built and then just a short time later, we were living with relatives and couldn’t bake cookies in their kitchens, using their ingredients, getting flour on the floor.
I press the cookies in the pan with bare, clean hands, pinching off the dough and tasting it. “Is this the time I’m going to get sick?” I think. But I never do. I ponder that I didn’t want my kids to eat the raw dough, when I made these cookies for them…but they did anyway. Clint did too and once fixed the kids their own bowls of raw dough, with me picturing DHS workers taking away our children for this. They ate it with a spoon and no one got sick.
I push them in the oven, at 350 degrees instead of the 375 to cook them slower. I watch them closely, to just brown the edges, and not let the middle get brown at all. By the time you smell them cooking, it’s too late and they are overcooked. The middle should indent slightly when you push your finger into it gently. It shouldn’t be raw looking or gooey, it should just indent and your finger should come away clean. The air from the oven is hot and sweet, the smell of brown sugar and fat. Don’t open the door too often. Use the light and watch them become a token of perfectly baked love.
Here is the most important part. When you see the edges are brown, put a couple of pot holders or a clean, dry dish towel down on the counter.
Take the cookies out and carefully hold them up about a foot and a half above the pot holders.
Drop them with a solid thud,making sure you get a solid WHOMP sound. I have taught my daughter this, and now my daughter in law…I hear them say “oh, to get cookies like that, you gotta whack them on the counter, just give them a big ol’ WHOMP!” when they tell their friends how to make these delightful cookies.
You may even have to give them a little oomph on their downward descent. Make sure the whole pan settles, it’s ok to drop them more than once. WHOMP! just like that. Those cookies will never see it coming. I WHOMP the cookies with satisfaction and watch them fall in on themselves.
This will compact them and change their texture, making them chewy and soft, dense and lovely.
Think about that the next time life WHOMPS you, pulling you from a warm place before you think you are ready, just as you thought you were almost done… suddenly dropping you from great heights, plummeting you against hardness, settling your basic ingredients to your very core and center.
It is simply God, making sure you are delightful.
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