Baking tasty treats for my friends and peers is my chief source of confidence and self-esteem, so the fact that I make pretty shit cookies is a big let-down for me.

            Or at least it was the biggest let-down. But, no more! For a new recipe has yielded 18 of the best cookies I’ve ever made (along with the help of my boyfriend). These cookies baked and tasted like absolute magic. Where cookies I made before came out too thin but also somehow too chewy (but like, in a bad way) these ones were beautiful; thicker, cakey but crispy, with melty and soft chocolate chips.

            I can’t not share this magical recipe so, here we go: here is the key to my newly found confidence in myself.

You will need:

• 240 grams of plain flour
• A healthy pinch of salt
• Two medium eggs
• Eight teaspoons of baking powder (this seems like a lot and I was trying to rationalise this – like surely we didn’t actually use eight teaspoons? But we did? And the cookies turned out perfect? Jesus Christ, this might kill us)
• 12 tablespoons of unsalted butter (this is an American recipe – of course there’s going to be a shit ton of butter)
• 6 tablespoons of granulated sugar
• 10 tablespoons of dark brown sugar
• Vanilla extract (this vanilla bitch just fucking pours as much vanilla in as I want. You should use a teaspoon at least)
• Whatever chips/fillings you want! We made half the batch chocolate chip with some salt flaked on top and then the rest were my favourite – white chocolate and macadamia nut.

Method

• Firstly, you want to brown your butter. Do this by getting all your butter in a pot and heating it up over medium-high heat. Do so until it’s all melty and beautiful and starts to smell like the death your literal beating heart has always desired. It’ll start to bubble and foam up a bit, but toss it about in the pan until you can see it’s starting to brown. When you reach a dark caramel colour, take it off the heat and leave it to brown a little more and then cool to room temperature. It’s important to cool your butter before you add it to the rest of your dough later, or else you’ll cook your eggs. Then you’ll have scrambled egg cookies. That’s fucking gross, don’t do that.
• Measure out your dry ingredients and stick them in a bowl all together. With a spatula give your dry ingredients a little mix about until everything is well incorporated. Using a spatula instead of a whisk is helpful in making cookies because it means you won’t overmix the dough. I don’t know what overmixing really does but I’ve been told it’s bad and you shouldn’t do it. We didn’t do it and our cookies were great.
• Add in your eggs and vanilla and mix in. It’s not likely that these ingredients will turn the mix into the form and texture you imagine it ought to be, but that’s okay. Your butter is still cooling.
• Wait for your butter to cool.
• Keep waiting.
• Seriously, keep waiting. Don’t fucking cook the eggs.
• …
• Okay! Your butter is now at room temperature. Add it on in to your mix and mix it up some more. Be patient with mixing it – it takes a bit of time to mix the dough into a good consistency and that’s okay. If, after a good while of whisking, it is still not how you think it should be, add some more COOLED browned butter.
  • Note: after we browned the butter and added it to the mix, my boyfriend said he wants to have browned butter in every food he makes from now on. Browned butter is, how they kids say, the Bees Knees.
• Divvy up your dough if you need to in order to add your chips! If you only want one flavour of cookie then obviously don’t divide up your dough, idiot. We added white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts to one half of the dough and classic milk chocolate chips to the other. Both were delicious.
• Unfortunately, cookies are not too soon in the horizon. You have to cover your mixing bowl up with plastic wrap and stick this big bowl of bad boy cookie dough in the fridge for at least an hour to firm up and get all sexy. During this hour or so, you can do what you want. Maybe thinking about that cookie dough in the fridge will distract you from the other things in your head that you don’t want to think about. Maybe it’ll distract you from that new girl at work with the long hair who always smells of that perfume your mum wore when you were younger. Maybe the thought of cookie dough firming up in the fridge will distract you from thinking about those money problems you have. But hey, it’s January, just after Christmas. Everyone has money problems from buying all those gifts! Well, a lot of people have kids to buy for, to be honest, and that’s very expensive. You only bought gifts for your mum and that guy Brian you work with because you were forced into the secret Santa at work. You don’t have any kids or dependents to buy on and you’re not really close enough with your friends anymore to warrant buying them all gifts. But you’re still somehow skint and then also convinced yourself it was wise to fork out the like, fifteen quid it takes to buy ingredients for cookies. Cookies aren’t cheap when you’re making them homemade and with love. You could have just bought a bag of big cookies for a pound from literally any shop but instead you dragged yourself around the whole supermarket desperately wondering why there’s like fourteen different kinds of flour – don’t they all do the same things? There’s just so much happening in the world for there to be so much flour and it’s all happening at once and you’re skint and your mum’s asking why you don’t have kids and Brian hates those Star Wars socks you got him for the secret Santa and –
• Your dough is ready! Scoop the dough out of the bowl and into little balls and place on a baking tray. Your oven should be pre-heated to 180 degrees, by the way? You waited an hour for your cookie dough to firm up; you can wait five or ten minutes more for your oven to heat up too. While you’re waiting, line a baking tray with grease proof paper for your little delicious cookie balls to hang out on.
• Let your cookies bake for 8-10 minutes. Keep an eye on them. Watching cookies bake is a magical experience, and more entertaining than whatever is on TV right now, probably. Don’t open your oven while they cook because that might fuck them up. When they start to flatten out all nice, that’s when you know you can think about removing them.
• Let the cookies cool on the baking tray out of the oven for like, 15-20 minutes. After that you can use a metal spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack or something that might act as one, to speed up the cooling process.
• Let’s not lie to ourselves – you’re going to eat these cookies warm when they’re still basically just warm dough. Fuck it, it’s January, the saddest month of the year. This might be the only happiness you have all month, so enjoy it!