Hi Ginny,
So I lost a bet with my sister and the price was that I had to bake the New York Times's recent recipe for perfect chocolate-chip cookies with as few compromises as possible. As it turned out, it was quite a task to track down all the ingredients. Plus, I had to plan thirty-six hours in advance of serving them, to allow for the recommended "marinating" peeriod for the dough. Finally, by Saturday morning, I had found 60 percent cacao bittersweet chocolate chips (though not the discs the recipe recommended), cake flour (surprisingly hard to come by here), sea salt, unsalted European butter. I don't have a mixer with a paddle attachment, so I had to do the mixing by hand. But I think I did a pretty good job of it, and I followed their advice and pressed a piece of plastic wrap to the dough before refrigerating it. By Sunday at 10 pm, the dough was ready to bake. I used a Silpat baking mat, sprinkled each dough dollop with sea salt, flatteded the chips that were poking up, and let them rest on the cookie sheet for ten minutes before transferring them to the rack to finish cooling. In the end, the cookies were pretty professional-tasting, but I'm not sure they were that much better than the normal Nestle Toll House recipe. Maybe if I'd used the discs, or mixed the dough with a mixing paddle....
CVD
