Monday, November 15, 2010

Cookies

I have been craving homemade chocolate chip cookies since I arrived in Road Town in mid-August, but I have been putting off baking them because I wasn't able to find pecans at the grocery store. A slow day at work and lots of cookie and cake-related posts on food blogs made the craving especially bad today, and so I finally crumbled and asked HB, since he was off, to stop by the grocery store and pick up the necessary ingredients.

Miraculously, HB was able to find chopped pecans at Riteway, something I have looked for every time I've gone to the store and never seen. Unfortunately, he was not able to find semi-sweet chocolate chips, so we had to make do with semi-sweet chocolate chunks instead. Nonetheless, I baked a batch of delicious cookies tonight that hardly differed from those I've made so many times in the US. It made both of us very happy to have this most important of comfort foods here in our new home in the BVIs.








For those who are interested, here is the recipe I use, just slightly tweaked from the quintessential chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of the Toll House bag:

"Wet Ingredients":
1 c Crisco
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla

"Dry Ingredients":
2 1/4 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

"Mix-ins":
1 12 oz bag Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 c chopped pecans

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2. Mix wet ingredients together in large bowl. Note: Use a dry measuring cup to measure crisco, and liquid measuring cups to measure sugars
3. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredient mixture and mix well. Note: Use liquid measuring cup to measure flour
4. Add mix-ins to dough and stir until combined.
5. Place 1 tsp portions of dough on cookie sheets at least 1 inch apart.
6. Bake for ?? minutes at 375 degrees.

The reason I do not specify the number of minutes in this recipe is because it varies by oven. For my mom, it's 6 minutes and 15 seconds. For the gas oven I'm using here in Tortola, it's 9 minutes and 30 seconds. You will have to judge the appropriate time for yourself. Start at six minutes, and keep checking every minute or so after that. The cookies are done when the uppermost parts of the cookies have turned a golden brown.

Wrapped tightly in aluminum foil, these cookies can keep for 4 or 5 days on the counter. Not that they'll last that long.

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