Cookie Update

If you think I've moved on from my New York Times Chocolate Chip Cookie obsession, you would be wrong.

In fact, I took advantage of the reduced crowds afforded me by Super Bowl Sunday to journey to the Whole Foods in Tustin on a hunt for the elusive fèves. I didn't find any Jacques Torres fèves, but that might be because I was distracted by the bulk bin of Peruvian Dark 65% cacao behemoths (pictured above with a puny, measly 60% Cacao Ghiradelli Premium Baking Chip). For $14.99 per pound they probably cost less than having Jacques Torres $12 2 lb bag overnighted from NYC to NOC, barely.


So how did the cookies turn out? Well, I only used a pound because a certain chocolate eating monster, who we'll just call David for the sake of argument, ate four ounces. But I've been pretty happy with 11.5 ounces of the 60% Cacao Ghiradelli Premium Baking Chips, which were a whole 8.5 ounces short of the 20 ounces the recipe calls for.

The verdict: if you like whole bites of cookie containing nothing but chocolate, these are the chips for you. But my independent taste tester preferred cookies made with the 60% Cacao Ghiradelli Premium Baking Chips because each bite had a better balance of chocolate and cookie. I don't think reducing the amount of chips would help this problem as the size of the chip is the problem. You can see from the overhead picture of the cooling cookies that the chips tended to stay in the center of the cookie as opposed to spreading evenly throughout. Also, my independent taste tester thought the cookies looked "weird." More specifically, he thought they looked as though someone was trying to hide something under a rug. The cookie part was very thin and the chip parts were giant mountains - as you can see in the side view.

So I think we're going to stick with the much more economical and easy to procure 60% Cacao Ghiradelli Premium Baking Chips.

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