Chocolate chip cookies

Ingredients:

4 cups all purpose flour

1 cup Jell-O chocolate pudding mix or vanilla pudding mix

1 tsp baking soda

2.0 cups softened unsalted butter

2 cups brown sugar

1 cup sugar

1 tsp kosher salt

2 cup dark chocolate

2 tsp vanilla extract

3 eggs

Directions:

It took quite a bit of researching to come up with a recipe that produced soft and chewy cookies worthy of posting. So here is it is. Enjoy. My cousins, nieces and nephew certainly did. 

Add butter in with the eggs, vanilla extract, salt, baking soda and white sugar. Mix very well until the ingredients have blended together into a consistent syrup and the white sugar has completely dissolved. Next measure out 2 cups of brown sugar into a separate bowl. Pinch the lumpy bits so the grains are separated otherwise you will have to stir for much longer to get rid of those big hard clumps. Throw in the brown sugar in with the wet ingredients and mix, but making sure the mixture is still gritty. That is, the brown sugar hasn't dissolved completely into the mixture unlike the white sugar. Next toss in the pudding mix powder in with the wet ingredients until it has blended in. Finally sift in the flour with the wet ingredients and mix together. At this point the dough will be quite stiff so you may want to use a wooden spoon or use your hands to work the flour completely. Once your dough is ready, add in the chocolate. Roll out a dough ball about 1.5" in diameter. You should have about 48-52 cookies. Cover the balls with saran wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. I like to prepare the dough in the evening and refrigerate overnight. NB. I do want to experiment with this dough and see if it can be frozen.

Preheat the oven to 325F. Place parchment paper on the cookie sheets. I usually fit 12 cookies per sheet. Because the dough is cold, it retains its spherical shape longer in the heat preventing it from falling flat immediately once it is placed in the oven. Bake for 18 minutes. After taking out of the oven for a few minutes, the cookies will firm up a bit and you can transfer them onto a cooling rack. 

Some clarification about the recipe. I have made this recipe several times now. The first time I didn't mix the brown sugar thoroughly enough that it still retained its granularity before adding the flour. I found I preferred this gritty texture in the cookie. Unfortunately I have not been able to replicate that grittiness to the same degree. I think I may try mixing it together at the flour stage to see if the brown sugar would retain its granularity. 

I prefer using a good chocolate bar broken up with the blunt end of a butcher knife instead of using chocolate chips. I find the chocolate chips too sugary with an aftertaste that is totally opposite of good chocolate. Ordinarily I prefer milk chocolate instead of dark because of the bitterness, but the dark chocolate seem to lose its bitterness when heated. Because the chunks are differently sized, usually larger than a typical chocolate chip, this makes the chocolate even more intense when biting into the cookie. Of course you can modify the recipe to your preference.

Addendum: I made this cookie again on the week-end and it turned out perfect. This time I used vanilla flavoured Jell-O pudding mix and instead of dark chocolate, I used sliced almonds and raisons. I think this is my favourite combination now. I made the dough and refrigerated it overnight. My cousin told me to under bake them. The cookies turned out soft and gooey. Its been 24 hours and they are still soft and gooey. Though in this house, the cookies don't last long enough to harden. However, I have been trying to watch my weight and have restricted myself to one cookie a day. Extremely hard to do as I have absolutely no will power.