Chocolate Chip Cookies with Nuts
I’m skipping the Mega-Chippers recipe as the whole point of those is “make them bigger.” I am perfectly capable of doing that without needing to actually spend a week‘s recipe on them. Since the purpose of this adventure was to learn to bake better by baking a lot of things (practice makes perfect or so they say) something that is exactly the same except for the cookie scoop used will be passed over. Maybe I’ll make one of the later recipes big.
Given that, you may ask, what’s the big deal about adding some nuts in then? Ahh, here was a challenge for me. For most of the rest of these recipes I’ll be swapping in some different ingredients for part of the chocolate chips (and some of the other ingredients) in the Essential Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. The swapping will let me work from a baseline to learn how different things go together (or don't). The real challenge I had with this one was I toasted my own pecans. Previously when putting nuts in cookies I didn’t bother toasting the nuts, but it makes a difference I found. These were great! I think the full 4 dozen cookies might have lasted 18 hours around here.
These had the added bonus of explaining to Jackson some cooking terminology with which he was unfamiliar. I got to feel smart, which is a rare thing these days.