American Cookie
When making cookies, and I use this in the soft-style American cookie, and not the crunchy biscuits that you get in the UK, I swear by the Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe. It is an excellent basic base, and I just chop and change the ingredients to how I wish for them to turn out. The recipe makes a good base for a soft cookie American cookie. When I bake, I will usually hunt around for similar recipes that will give me the bog standard basics, and then I will go nuts as I wish for the cooking.
Keep in mind that this recipe will be in American measurements, and thus uses measuring cups instead of weights. If you are in a country that does not use cup measures, I suggest that you read this cooking method to inform you of the correct way to use flour, white sugar, brown sugar etc. with cup measures (that is not trying to be condescending, I had found myself explaining this to my friend as they stared at me with bemusement trying to understand why in the world I would even use cup measures. When there are much more precise measures for baking. The short answer is – Aga cookers and gas marks.)
Equipment to Note
Hand Mixer
I did not use a hand mixer for this. It was a hard, hard life without it! But wholly possible. So don’t worry if you do not have one.
Baking Sheets
However, due to the sheer amount of cookies, the small size of the baking sheets, and the fact that the kitchen was getting warm and warming my dough, I did use a round-robin method of 4 different baking sheets. I definitely suggest having at least 3 different ones to allow for cooling times between baking rounds.
Servings: About 32 medium-sized cookies
Winter Spice Nut American Cookie Recipe
These biscuits are incredibly flavourful, with a sweet and spiced crunch.
Ingredients
- 2 ¼ cups self-rising flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp Cinnamon
- ½ tsp Nutmeg
- ¼ tsp All Spice
- ¼ tsp Ground Cloves
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- 1 cup butter (you can use softened, however, I used spreadable and it was great)
- ¾ cup granulated sugar
- ¾ cup packed brown sugar (only use the dark soft sugar for best results, and if it is not a brand new packet, sift out the sugar before adding it in)
- 1 tsp Vanilla extract
- 1 tsp Caramel extract
- ½ tsp Almond extract
- 2 Large eggs
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- 2 cups finely chopped mixed nuts
- 1 cup finely chopped white chocolate (I used a bar and chopped it up to give it more of a “rustic” feel)
Directions
- Step 1 Preheat the oven to 190 – 200 c or 375 f. Make sure that you have a wire rack in the middle of your oven so that the cookies get an even bake. If you are using softened butter rather than spreadable, I do suggest that you should have taken it out long before this time, and if you have not taken it out by now, you may need to wait. Do not microwave the butter to try and soften it faster, you have made your bed unfortunately and now you must lay in it.
- Step 2 This is the exact reason why I used spreadable butter instead because I am lazy and did not put my butter out fast enough.
- Step 3 You do not need to grease or prep your baking sheets, so you can start cooking straight away.
- Step 4 Sift all of the dry flour ingredients together into medium sized bowl. You do not need to mix them, but sifting them will add air into the mixture.
- Step 5 With a hard wooden spoon beat together the butter, sugar(s), and extract essences. You will need to beat this hard until all of the lumps are out, and air has been beaten into it. You will see it start to change colour and texture. It took me a good 10 minutes of beating it (generally in the same direction) to get it the consistency that I thought was vaguely good.
- Step 6 Once you are happy with it, add in an egg at a time and continue beating it with the wooden spoon after each egg. Make sure that each egg is adding more egg into the mixture.
- Step 7 After you have beaten in your eggs, add in your flour mixture slowly. I added in a ⅓ at a time and once each was added in well, I would go back to add more.
- Step 8 Finally, add your nuts and white chocolate chunks to the mixture.
- Step 9 *note: You will be tempted to try the dough, and it will taste delicious. But it is a lot more flavoursome than the cookies will be and as a result if you have a bunch of the dough at this stage the cookies will taste bland and disappointing (if you eat them immediately after coming out of the oven and back to back). Do not worry, they don’t taste bland and boring. Not that I would know about this at all 🙂
- Step 10 I have eluded to the round-robin baking technique, and I do feel as if I should give some hints on the timings and how I winged it.
- Step 11 Please note – the recipe says about 9 to 11 minutes, with 2 minutes cooled on the baking sheet. My cookies were about 10 minutes to bake as they were a bit large. In total, they cooled for a minimum of 35 minutes. Otherwise, they become incredibly crumbly.
- Step 12 Leave about 1 inch, or 2 cm between cookies to allow them to spread.
- Step 13 This does not go for the original placement of rack 1 into the oven, with rack 2 prepped to go in while it was baking.
But as of starting from rack 2 here is basically the Gantt chart that I used to coordinate the baking of the cookies.
And repeat, there are a lot of cookies, so don’t worry, it will get done.
Enjoy.
