Obsessive Mom's Chocolate Chip Cookies

The other night I had a bothersome sweet tooth. This sweet tooth was a real nuisance. I'm talking nuisance like a house fly endlessly buzzing against the window while the back door is wide open nuisance. I'm not sure how you would handle an overly aggressive sweet tooth, but I'll tell you how I handled mine.

I decided to bake chocolate chip cookies, but I was down to my last stick of butter when most chocolate chip cookie recipes call for two sticks of butter.

I thumbed through cookie books and blogs, searching for a recipe that required only one stick of butter, and in a short amount of time, I found one. Hot damn! I could already envision that pesky sweet tooth in my rear view mirror. So long sweet tooth!

Though my 'Hurray!' would be short lived because right smack dab in the middle of the page were the words, Hazelnut Butter. Hazelnut Butter? I didn't have Hazelnut Butter, nor would I ever have had Hazelnut Butter. My excitement waned. If I had had an empty tin can, I would have kicked it I was so bummed. And then it came to me. Nutella! In place of the Hazelnut Butter I could use Nutella. Hurray again!  {These cookies were starting to look less like the recipe in front of me and more like an exercise in substitutions: First the Nutella in place of Hazelnut Butter, then considering the sweetness of the Nutella, I reduced the amount of sugar. In place of a whole vanilla bean, I used vanilla extract.}

While the cookies baked I sat in my kitchen listening to a man on the radio talk about crop circles. It was late in the evening, the rascals were sleeping, and my husband was downstairs watching Mad Men by way of Netflix. Don't you just love Netflix, especially now that it's streaming through XBox? Anyways, back to the sweet tooth/cookie fiasco.

While the rascals were in bed, and husband was downstairs, devouring episode upon episode of Mad Men, I was in chocolate, hazelnut heaven. There's something calming about the smell of butter and sugar, AND Nutella. Don't you agree? I kid you not, my house smelled like what I think the Keebler hollow tree would smell like.

When the oven timer went off, I opened the over door to thick, almost perfectly round chocolate chip cookies. I didn't even wait for them to cool before I bit down on one. Almost immediately my annoying sweet tooth was gone. Can I get another, Hurray! These cookies stayed chewy in the middle even after they cooled.

That night I went to bed dreaming of hazelnuts, chocolate and crop circles. Crazy.

Here's the recipe:

 

Obsessive Mom’s Chocolate Chip Cookies

From Mom’s Big Book of Cookies by Lauren Chattman

Ingredients

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup hazelnut butter or Nutella

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

¾ cup firmly packed light brown sugar

¾ cup granulated sugar (I used ¼ cup)

2 large eggs

1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise (I used a teaspoon vanilla extract)

2 cups semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips

¾ cup finely chopped skinned hazelnuts (optional)

1.       Preheat the oven to 375⁰F

2.       Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in medium-sized mixing bowl.

3.       Cream the cooled melted butter, hazelnut butter (or Nutella), and sugars together in a large mixing bowl with a wooden spoon until smooth. Add the eggs and beat until smooth. Scrape the seeds of the vanilla bean into the bowl (or add the vanilla extract) and stir until well distributed. Stir in the flour mixture until just incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chips and the nuts, if you are using them. Place bowl in the refrigerator for 10 minutes (or up to 6 hours) to let the dough firm up.

4.       Drop the dough by heaping tablespoonfuls onto ungreased baking sheets, leaving about 3 inches between each cookie.

5.       Bake the cookies until golden around the edges but still soft on top, 9 to 11 minutes. Let the cookies stand on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, then remove them with a metal spatula to a wire rack to cool completely. Cookies will keep at room temperature in an airtight container for 2 to 3 days.