Irenes Incredibly Intrinsic Cookie Recipe
Ingredients
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature*
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature*
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups unsifted flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 cups ANY chips.**
Preheat oven to 375°F and grease your cookie tray with unsalted butter. Don’t be shy, grease the sides too.
In a large bowl add flour, baking soda and salt. Mix together and set aside.
In a large electric mixing bowl add softened butter & sugar. On medium speed beat together till fluffy. Do not over beat!!!
Scrape down sides, add the eggs and vanilla, mix on LOW till just nicely blended.
Once eggs are nicely blended add flour mixture, 1/4 cup at a time, to the electric mixing bowl. You want the speed of the mixer to be slow, but not too slow. You want to be able for it to spin around that you can add 1/4 cup of flour in the amount of time it takes to spin back around. It’s also slow enough that flour doesn’t fly everywhere. Add flour, let it blend, add flour, blend and repeat till you’re out of flour.
Add your chocolate chips to the bowl and mix in with a wooden spoon. (If you’re like me and like to mix things up, if you’re using chocolate chunks, go ahead and mix that in the electric mixture and it’ll break up the chunks a bit more. I also added 1 cup of Reeses Peanut Butter chips by hand with a wooden spoon after the chunks).
Using a cookie scoop, add cookies to your tray. Leave space between cookies. (I recommend light colored cookie trays like Nordicware.) Bake cookies for 10-14 minutes. The cooking time varies depending on your oven, the trays you use, the size of your cookies and the size of your tray. (I use a standard size cookie scoop, the extra large Nordicware tray and fit 15 cookies on it, 1” apart.. my sweet spot is 12 1/2 minutes, and 11 minutes when I use a regular Nordicware cookie sheet. )
When your cookies are slightly golden on the edges, but still white, remove tray from oven. Allow cookies to both “finish cooking” and cool on tray for 5 minutes.
Remove from tray and let fully cool on a cookie rack.
ENJOY!!
* Butter and eggs MUST be room temperature!! Take them out the night before if you must. This cookie recipe can NOT be done spur of the moment. Waiting for the butter to soften and the eggs to come to room temperature makes the cookies so much better, trust me. Do NOT use melted butter!!!!!
** You can use Semi-sweet chocolate, peanut butter, milk chocolate, white chocolate, caramel, smore chips. Literally anything. This is a cookie base recipe and I use them for EVERYTHING (except oatmeal cookies or oatmeal raisin). If you want chocolate chip cookies I recommend Ghirardelli semi-sweet mini chocolate chips, kids have NO IDEA they’re semi-sweet either! Guittard is a great brand to use if you’re going for chunks, buy two boxes of Guittard semi-bitter bars and beat them in a bag. (That’s the chocolate chunks in the cookies pictured in this recipe. I also used half a bag of Reeses peanut butter chips because I only had one box of the bars. See… you can literally use ANYTHING.)
