Procrastibaking: Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Cookies

Sometimes when I find recipes online, I think, “Okay, this may turn out great, or my baking equipment will hate me forever.”  Seriously, I am concerned that one day my spatula will see an ill-advised combination of ingredients in my mixing bowl and I’ll hear a faint, “You want me to scrape that?” emanating from the handle.  You never know.  I say this because I tried a recipe once for chocolate muffins years ago, where I was told the batter would yield a dozen muffins.  My mom read through the recipe and she thought that there just wasn’t enough of each ingredient going into the batter.  I was in elementary or middle school at the time, so, at an age when I took a recipe’s directions over my mom’s years of experience (sorry, Mom).  The batter yielded three muffins.  And they weren’t even good.

Now, when I try recipes, I read at least twenty comments from people who have tried the recipe, or I go with a cookbook that hasn’t failed me in the past (I can do a post on cookbooks if you’d like!).  Comments on recipes may be the most useful comments on the internet.  There are generally no trolls (because who’s going to insult a chocolate chip cookie recipe?), people provide honest feedback (e.g. “The recipe said bake 9-10 minutes, but they were done after 8”), or you get some hilarious fails.  My favorite recipe fail has to be the review entitled “HORRIBLE MESS IN MY OVEN,” where a woman attempted to bake a chocolate cake, but the batter spilled over in the oven and yup, you guessed it.  She said her “poor husband” had to scrape the oven clean.  My mom, sister, and I refer to it as the HMIMO cake now, and we’ve tried the recipe.  If it doesn’t end up destroying your oven, it’s actually a freaking fantastic cake.  I won’t be mad if you leave my post now to go bake that cake.

But this cookie recipe I’m about to post here has not been altered (except that I left out the chocolate drizzle at the end, because it called for shortening, which I am not fond of using).  You could leave now and go to the site where it was originally posted by clicking here.  But if you want a helpful step-by-step of what your batter should look like (basically, a glorified recipe review), keep reading.  I love this recipe because you only need one bowl, and up until this point I had not realized how well cinnamon and chocolate go together in a cookie (I mean, the flavor combination made sense, but holy moly is this yummers!).

This is another recipe where you need to leave your butter (2 sticks) and eggs (2 large) out ’til they’re at room temperature.  Got those?  Perfect, let’s begin.  For anyone on my floor reading this, yes, these are the cookies I baked a few weeks ago, and I am only posting the pictures now.  Please do not think that I baked cookies this week and hid them away from you.  Actually, yesterday I baked double chocolate cherry walnut cookies, but that recipe is going up later.

Put your softened room-temperature butter in a large bowl.  This is the only bowl you will need for the recipe, so make sure it’s large.  The recipe says to beat it with a mixer on high for 30 seconds.  You know of my mixer woes, so just mix it really quickly for 100 stirs.

Now add 1 cup packed brown sugar, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon.

Go ahead and throw everything in.

Stir until combined, scraping the bowl as needed with a spatula.

Everything smells like cinnamon and I want to eat the bowl.

Add 2 eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Stir until combined.

Now add 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour.  Be sure to start by mixing slowly, because that much flour will fly straight onto you if you try mixing it full-force to start.  Here, mixing with a wooden spoon has its advantages, because the batter will get a bit difficult to mix, and a mixer might not actually be able to get the whole job done.  You’ll have some flour in some awkward spot, and you’ll have to use a wooden spoon to properly incorporate everything (so, HA, technology, I’m not completely reliant on you for my cookie-baking).  Then add 2 cups of chocolate chips and mix:

Take out a couple of cookie sheets and line them with parchment paper.  My cookie sheets are super small, because this is England and I don’t know why, but everything is smaller here.  Shape the dough into 1″ balls and space them about 1-1 1/2″ apart from each other.  My oven preheats pretty quickly, so now is the time that I would preheat my oven to 190 degrees celsius (375 degrees F).

Right, off you go to the oven!  Bake 6-8 minutes, or until the edges are slightly browned.  You will smell cinnamon and butter everywhere.

THEY SMELL SO GOOD.

Let them cool for a couple of minutes before transferring them onto a cooling rack (or just straight up eat them).

What is not pictured is the small room of medievalists who ate the dozen and a half cookies I brought with me to our medieval history workshop the following day.  Now, the recipe says this will yield 72 cookies.  I managed a little over 50 cookies (to be fair, I would’ve paid more attention counting the total number of cookies baked, but I might have eaten a couple of cookies and given some away to some girls on my floor who wandered into the kitchen wondering why our hallway smelled like cinnamon).

Here’s the recipe in full:

Ingredients:
1 cup/2 sticks/230g unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 large eggs (also at room temperature)
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 190 degrees C (375 degrees F).
2. In a large bowl, mix butter for 30 seconds with a mixer (on high), or stir 100 times vigorously.
3. Add both sugars, the baking soda, salt, and cinnamon and mix until combined.
4. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix until combined.
5. Add flour and mix until combined.
6. Fold in chocolate chips.
7. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper/non-stick cooking spray.  Roll batter into 1″ balls and space them 1-1 1/2″ apart on the baking sheet.
8. Bake for 6-8 minutes, or until edges are golden brown.  Remove from oven and let cool for a couple of minutes before transferring them onto a cooling rack.  Eat, and share the remainder (if you want to).

Thanks for reading!  This was a pretty short post, so don’t be surprised if I write up another post this week.  Then again, I have another chapter draft due next week (self-imposed, otherwise I will get nothing done), so this may be the only post this week.  We’ll see!

Happy procrastibaking!

Val