Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cookies

An important life-skill for college is being able to bake chocolate chip cookies to share with friends. Here is the recipe I use, it makes about 24 cookies (depending on how I size them).

Step 0 is: pre-heat the oven to 350°.

In a mixing bowl, combine the following ingredients:

• ½ cup of coconut oil (or butter)
• 1 cup of sugar (crunchy brown turbinado preferred)
• 1 egg (I always pick the chalaza filament out)
• ¾ teaspoon of baking soda
• ¼ teaspoon of salt
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

Mix these until homogenized (I recommend a hand mixer). Now add:

• 1 + ⅔ cups of flour (1 basic gluten-free flour + ⅔ oat flour)
• < 1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips (excess will fall to the bottom of the bowl)
• Optionally, < ½ cup of chopped nuts

Mix some more until it all looks like cookie dough.

Put parchment paper on your baking sheet, dollop cookie dough onto sheet, bake for 10 minutes.

After you remove them from the oven, let them sit for a few (3-4?) minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack/paper towels/your stomach. (You will want a spatula with a very thin edge for this transfer.)

Hazelnut Variation

• Replace ⅓ cup of flour with ⅓ cup of hazelnut flour.
• Use < ½ cup of chopped hazelnuts specifically (and non-optionally)
• Add 1 teaspoon of hazelnut extract

Other variations are also quite nice, like using pecans and maple sugar, but in terms of effort-to-output optimization I am consistently pleased with the hazelnut variation.

Cocoa Marbling

After all the mixing is done, add:

• > 1 tablespoons of cocoa powder

Mix the top half of your dough for 5 seconds, just enough to spread the cocoa over the dough without actually stirring it in. When you are forming the dough for the baking sheet, you will get the cocoa streaks that turn into the marbling during baking.