Oh, How the Cookie Crumbles

Today, I bring you the next adventure in my Quest for the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe search.

I tried another recipe that was given to me recently by my Aunt Jean. I think it may be my Grandmother's recipe, which I've written about before. Let me just say immediately that these turned out NOTHING like how my grandma's did.  I have many several reasons in my mind as to why that could be, but let's back up a bit first.

Mixing up another batch!

First, in looking at this recipe, I noticed that it was almost identical to the recipe I had tried last weekend. The differences were that this recipe included slightly more flour, slightly more of both sugars, slightly more baking soda, slightly more salt, and half as much vanilla. When I say slightly, I really do mean very slight differences of each of these ingredients. The proportions were very, very similar in both recipes.

The biggest problem I have dealt with so far in making any of these recipes is that I do not have butter flavored crisco or Nucoa brand margarine on hand. Almost every recipe specifically calls for one or both of those ingredients. I do have a large tub of regular crisco, and I hate to waste, so I've been using that. And, I have regular unsalted butter that I've been using instead of nucoa or margarine of any kind. To make matters even worse, the butter I'm currently trying to use up is generic store brand that I bought at the local gas station convenience store because I needed it for something else. Not to be all baking-goods-snobby, but I do believe quality (sometimes expensive) name brand ingredients make a difference when baking. Again, I hate to waste, so we're just going to suffer through for a while longer. And, I live an hour from the grocery store.

Moving on.

Today was not the day to get all experimenty with this recipe, but I did it anyway. I used 1/4 cup of almond flour in place of regular flour when I mixed up the batter. And, I decided to use 1 1/2 teaspoons of almond flavoring, too. The batter smelled really heavenly and I was really excited to bake these up!

Using a fancy schmancy cookie scoop! (Thanks, Carol!)

I formed the dough using a cookie scoop Carol had sent over a few days prior and placed the round balls on my trusty air bake pans, and into the oven went the first batch.

This is what came out of the oven, twelve minutes later:

Super flat, crispy, simultaneously burnt and undercooked, and they didn't scrape off the pan without breaking!

Yikes.

I did salvage some of the cookies from the first tray.
This picture makes it look like they're in jail, which is how I feel about them anyway. 

These were just as bad as the very first batch I made, following the recipe from the back of the chocolate chip cookie bag. I already had dough on my second pan, so the first two pans both turned out sad and holey. Pictures don't do justice to how crispy and crunchy these were.

Sad, broken cookies. This is how the cookie crumbles, folks.

That's when I nearly lost it. I was so excited for this batch of cookies, but they were turning out terrible! Jeff, the ever-eager cookie sampler, tried one with me and we both agreed that they tasted terrible, too! bleh. I was trying to continue scraping cookie parts off the pan, but they kept breaking or sticking to the pan and making a mess. I was getting really frustrated then, so I turned off the oven in a huff and attempted to put plastic wrap on the remaining dough, but it kept sticking to itself instead of the bowl... By now, I felt like nothing was going right at all and I myself was teetering on the edge of a chocolate chip cookie meltdown!

Jeff, my ever patient husband, was trying to help me figure out why they weren't working and eventually suggested we try adding extra flour to the dough. Perhaps we should have made adjustments for high altitude? There was nothing to lose at this point, so we added another quarter cup of flour and two teaspoons of water, and tried another batch in the oven.

These came out a little bit better. They held together better, but still spread out quite a bit and were very crispy.

After adding more flour, the cookies held together better.

We decided to add more flour still, and try again. This result was the best tray of cookies so far, although they still didn't taste great, and were still really crispy.

So, this was the first of what I would consider to be a true bust in my Quest. You know it's bad if Jeff hasn't come back to sneak any more cookies throughout the day.

Thoughts as to why these turned out so bad:

• Almond flour maybe isn't exactly interchangeable with regular flour, even though the package says it is.
• A little bit of almond flavoring goes a LOOOOOONG way!
• Once again, altitude seems to make a difference. Recipes that I get from my friends and family in the Midwest will likely need to be adjusted.
• I didn't use butter flavored crisco, or nucoa, as the recipe suggested.

I decided to research the altitude thing a bit more and dug out my trusty High Altitude Baking book to see what they say about cookies. The book suggests that most baking recipes will need to be adjusted for altitude at 3500 feet above sea level. That's pretty much exactly our altitude, so it makes sense that some recipes would need to be tweaked. Here's an excerpt:

Cookies: Although many sea level cookie recipes yield acceptable results at high altitudes, they often can be improved by a slight increase in baking temperature; a slight decrease in baking powder or baking soda, fat and/or sugar; and/or a slight increase in liquid ingredients and flour.

So then I went back and compared this recipe to the one I did last week. Remember how I said they were almost identical? If you take the suggestions from High Altitude Baking and apply them to the recipe I used today, you'd pretty much end up with the recipe I tried last week. Interesting, no? Once again, we've more or less proved that altitude DOES make a difference! Not that that excuses my almond obsession for these cookies, or the fact that I had the wrong fats...

With each addition of flour to the cookie dough, the cookies held together better and better.
Can you tell which cookie was baked first, second, and last?

Better luck next time! Thanks go to Jeff for keeping me sane! I definitely owe him some better cookies, and SOON! :)