What's This? A Recipe???

So you might be wondering: "How is this relevant?" It's not. I just like cookies. And if you've been reading my blog, you'll know that I mentioned recipes as occasional content here. This counts as one of those occasions.

About This Recipe

I've been searching for a really good — great, in fact — chocolate chip cookie recipe for about 15 years now. I'd always loved to cook, but I was never much of a baker, so I didn't want to start from scratch. And before the internet was a real part of my life, all I could do was look at commercial cookbooks, and poll people I thought of as decent bakers. But I never found a recipe that produced the ideal homemade flavor I remembered from childhood. Then came the internet: not just a career space for me, but a new part of my daily routine. I redoubled my search and started baking all over again.

I still didn't have much luck, but I was persistent: lots of ingredients, lots of oven lightings, and lots of mediocre cookies. Finally, I was inspired to just start working with other recipes, and tweaking individual ingredients in a search for the right mix. This recipe is the current iteration of the tweaking process. It's not 100% where I want it to be, but it makes a mighty good cookie. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

By the way, if you're wondering about the name — the base recipe is one of the many Famous Amos recipes out there. I’m not so famous, and I’m not Amos...

The Recipe

1 ¼ Cups Packed Dark Brown Sugar
¾ Cup White Sugar
1 ½ Cups Butter (Soft but not melted)
½ Cup Vegetable Oil (Canola, Corn, or even Olive)
2 Eggs
2 Tbsp. Vanilla Extract
4 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 ½ Tsp. Salt
½ Tsp. Cream of Tartar
1 Tsp. Baking Soda
2 ½ Cups Semi-Sweet or Dark Chocolate Chips (Milk chocolate chips work too, but they make a swee-eet cookie – use at your own risk!)

Makes: a ridiculous amount of cookies.

Thoroughly cream Sugars, Butter, Oil, Egg, and Vanilla. In a separate bowl, combine Flour, Salt, Cream of Tartar, and Baking Soda. Add dry ingredients by halves into the wet ingredients, mixing thoroughly. Add Chocolate chips (and the nuts of your choice if you’re into that kind of thing). You’ll want to bake these cookies right away, and make sure not to chill or refrigerate the dough — they lose flavor and consistency if chilled. (If you do need to refrigerate, just make sure you let the dough come back to room temperature before you start baking. That will help preserve at least some of the original flavor.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Drop cookies by heaping tablespoon onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 11-13 minutes, but beware: the cookies will not brown. (11 minutes is just about right in my oven.) Let cookies stand on the cookie sheet for 1 minute before transferring to cooling rack. (The cookies are incredibly soft and gooey when they first come out of the oven; without the standing time, you can end up with a lot of misshapen and broken cookies. They’ll taste fine, but you might just be ridiculed by friends and loved ones for not making nice, round cookies...)

Eat and enjoy! I'll be back soon with another deep post.

Postscript: An Updated Recipe

Only a week after posting this recipe, I've done some additional tweaking — so the one you see above has changed from what was originally posted. If you tried and liked the original, you'll probably like this one even more. If you haven't tried the original, skip it and try this one instead.

Updated: 7/26/08

A New Look for My Blog

Welcome back to The Frank Spot. I know you were probably expecting another deep, exhaustive post, but I wanted to interject a smaller essay on why my site design has already changed. This change will only be obvious to those of you who read Post 0.5 while I was building the site; the rest of you won't notice any change at all...

I started with a nifty little template called iTheme Techno. It was nice to look at, had some cool widget features, and really spoke to me on a creative level. It was also one of the most frustrating things I've ever played with on the web. Please know that I'm not criticizing any of the people involved with designing the template, or porting it to blogger — they all did wonderful jobs. But it's not easy to ensure functionality with every piece of third-party code that might be added. Sometimes, elements just don't work well together. That's what happened here. I mentioned a few template and widget problems at the end of Post 0.5; I stumbled into many, many more when I tried to integrate Intense Debate as my commenting system. So it was time to find another template.

I looked at about a hundred different designs; each had its own flair, its own positives and negatives, its own way to represent me. Ultimately, I picked the one you see now: Chocolate Candy. I liked the darker colors, subtle hues, and the general layout of the page. I would have preferred a right sidebar instead of a left one, but it was good start. (I may change the layout at some future point, but right now I'd rather focus on content.) Even so, it took me almost a week to get this new template up and running — and not without a lot of extra coding. If you visit in IE6, you might notice a few little CSS problems, but nothing to make me beat my fists on the desk and go without sleep. And the commenting system (including the recent comments widget) works pretty well.

I'll be tabling design tweaks for the foreseeable future, but I'd appreciate any feedback you'd care to provide about the layout, colors, flow, etc. I'd like to avoid tearing this one apart completely, or building a template from scratch, but I'll seriously consider anything you good folks suggest.

Coming Soon

It's taken me longer than I expected to get my next "real" post together: I'm working on it now, and you should see it sometime in the next two weeks. I promise it will be deep and entertaining, and just as long as you'd expect (read: worth waiting for). Later this week, I'll be posting a chocolate chip cookie recipe that I've been working on for quite a while. I don't know if baking cookies will keep you happy until I churn out my next philosophical rant, but I'm going to put the recipe up anyway. If you try it, I think you'll like it. If not, your friends just might. Either way, I hope you'll post your comments.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you soon.