Chocolate Chip Cookie War

Chocolate chip cookies.  So traditional.  Except .... the provoke wars.

Blessings, Darlings!

Ah, the chocolate chip cookies I have had in my life!

For years, the woman in the house next to ours baked and maintained a constant supply of them.  She used M&M's(TM) in the ones she baked.  All the kids in the houses around her came by for our daily dose.  And that was a fairly large number of kids - I was born close to the center of the Baby Boom.  I was only allowed to shake her down for cookies once a day, no more.  I don't know if the other parents had the same rule.  Come to think of it, I don't know how my parents would have known if I violated the rule, but I was a Good Kid so actually never did.

That was so long ago I don't recall anything else about the cookies - can't say if they had much brown sugar, estimate relative amounts of butter vs shortening, or anything else.  I was no foodie then!


Back in high school, quite some time ago, the school cafeteria had chocolate chip cookies that I felt rocked.  Thin, hot from the oven, the grease tended to soak thru' the waxed paper bags they were sold in.  These totally featured brown sugar (or the mix had cheap molasses added in quantity.  The flatness, and texture, spoke margarine as the main fat.  And that there was LOTS of fat. 

Ah, the days of me and cookies both being thin!  Such a long, long, LONG time ago.

Years passed.  I didn't really do sweets for a long time, preferring salty snacks.

Then I married and had a child.  Which led to adult vs child cookie wars.  For, as every parent knows, there are events you have to bake for.  Bake Sales.  Parties.  Pot lucks.  I learned for the first time the intricate effects of different types of fats in baking, and different types of sugar. 

I used only butter in MY cookies then.  Imagine my flat cookies, and my astonishment at seeing cookies that were thick!   OTOH, I was also astonished that those chocolate chip cookies were pallid things - only white sugar in them.

Then, out of no where, my husband and son went into war over sugar.  Yes, as noted a couple of weeks back, the chubby hubby and I like cookies that aren't overwhelmingly sweet.  So I usually used the full amount of brown sugar in chocolate chip cookies .... but reduced or eliminated the white sugar.  Our Spawn, young as he was, rose up in protest!

They also fought over nuts.  Husband wanted nuts, Spawn didn't. I was having to make a batch of cookie dough, split it into two parts, and add nuts to one part and more sugar to the other.

This had to stop.

How did the war end?

Obviously - I taught the Spawn to cook.  And I put him fully in charge of making his own dang cookies.

Since then, he has happily made batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies, searching for the recipe HE likes back.  He liked the online recipe for Alton Brown's Chewy Chocolate Chip cookies (from the "Three Cookies for Sister Marsha" episode), but we don't know where our printout of that got to.  A few days ago he did the recipe from AB's "early Years" cookbook.  But the recipe seems different - the cookies turned out much more cakey than chewy. The Spawn is sad, but still eating them.  He still has a quart of the raw dough for them in the fridge - he bakes about 3 at a time to have the at their hot gooey best.  He will survive, and test new recipes.

The battle rages on.

Frondly, Fern