The Cocoanut

After my last ramble on cookies, it dawned upon me that I’ve never actually made cookies, so since 2008 is the Year of the First-Time Dishes, I decided to bake my inaugural batch of cookies, joining the ranks of the inaugural roast chicken, white loaf and banana cake.

Among cookie connoisseurs, better known as Cookie Monsters, their manna from heaven can be broadly classified into two, the crispy thin, and the thick and chewy. The recipe I use gives delightfully fragile, wafer-thin discs of cookies studded with choc chips. Some people prefer the thick and chewy variety which is the most common type sold in the supermarkets and cafes, but I personally like my home made cookies thin. This way I get to eat more without feeling too guilty. The perfect, crunchy cookies, in my opinion, have got to be Famous Amos.

The recipe below is an easy, 15-minutes tops, idiot-proof guide that turns out about 20 or so cookies. It keeps well frozen, so you can shape it into a log and keep it in cling wrap for emergency use. As they say, a cookie a day…keeps depression at bay.

Choc Chip Cookies

120 g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
90 g butter
120 g caster sugar
50 g brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
160 g choc chips or to taste

1. Preheat a 180ºC oven. Grease 2-3 baking trays, or just use baking paper.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a small bowl and set aside.
3. With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars together. Initially the butter and sugar will find it hard to incorporate, so what I do is press the sugar and butter into each other with my fingers, and once they’ve incorporated I cream it with the mixer. Beat in the egg and vanilla.
4. Add the flour mixture and beat well with the mixer on low speed.
5. Stir in the choc chips and mix well into the dough
6. Drop teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto the baking trays, spacing them 2-5 cm apart. The biscuit will expand and flatten on its own during baking, so there’s no real need to flatten or shape them into perfect circles. Unless you really want to.
7. Bake until golden brown, about 10-12 minutes. Transfer the biscuits to a wire rack and let cool.