Anger Burger

Item the first: I have the flu.  I don’t want to type the s-word, but we’re all thinking it.

Item the second: No food sounds especially good to me today, but for the peculiar exception of chocolate chip cookies?  Why?  I don’t know.  Wait, yes — my mom mentioned them on the phone the other day.  Anyway, I can’t wait for the New York Times recipe to ripen¹ to a grand old age, and besides, my vulnerable-sicky-baby-cookie-need demands the cakey sub-species of chocolate chip cookie.

A while back I tried the Alton Brown’s “The Puffy” cookie and found it disgusting.  I’m trying to remember wh — oh yes, the butter-flavored shortening.  Oh hell no.

After some despondent, sore-throat, lethargic, achy, sneezy, drippy Googling, I discovered a pattern: instant pudding in the mix.   Pudding cookies.  I hesitated, sensing another path down the road that led to The Puffy.   But then again, pudding mix is essentially just flavoring and food starch, so maybe it all makes sense.  And then again maybe I have the flu.

Honestly, though, these were pretty good.  The recipe came together easily (it’s frankensteined from about four other recipes).  The real test is to determine if they soften up a little overnight, since cookies are often crispy when straight from the oven (and cooled) but then soften as they humidify in their air-tight storage containers.  I’m uncertain that I am making sense any longer.  I’ll just give you the recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies, Immature Style
makes about … 40? what?  who?

2 sticks (8 oz.) butter, softened
2/3 C. sugar
2/3 C. brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 eggs
1 4oz. (small) box of instant vanilla pudding

2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 1/2 C. flour
1 1/2 C. semi-sweet chocolate chips

• Preheat oven to 325°.

• Cream the butter with the sugars until pale and fluffy.  Add the vanilla.  Add eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl to keep things moving along.  Add the package of vanilla pudding.

• Add the flour, baking soda and powder and salt.  Remove from mixer and hand-stir in the chips.  Or use the mixer, whatever, who are we kidding.

• Scoop small balls onto the cookie sheet (I did 12 per sheet) and flatten just a hair to make a kind of hockey-puck of dough.  Bake for about 20 minutes or until very lightly browned.  Remember these are cakey cookies; they are pale and immature, just like you.

• Eat several straight from the pan and get a tummy-ache.

¹ If you’ve never heard of the infamous NYT chocolate chip cookie (CCC) recipe (also called the Jacques Torres chocolate-chip cookie recipe), be advised: it garnered nearly the same fervor that the admittedly-delightful-but-not-exactly-news No-Knead Bread did.  In the NYT CCC recipe, the dough is aged for several days in the fridge before use.  They are fantastic, though most people I know eschew the expensive and sort of redonk chocolate fèves in favor of plebeian chips.  If you have any foresight and freezer space at all, you can have these complex, flavorsome cookies any time you like.  If you’re me, you have neither.

UPDATE: The Next Day
They are delightful!  Still a little chewy around the edges, rather than crispy, and chewy/cakey in the middle.  I can’t even taste the fake-vanilla flavor of the instant pudding, they are just tasty.  I realized too late, but a long time ago a vegan pal of mine made these vegan cookies that tasted EXACTLY like Chips Ahoy CCC and I freaked out, asking her what the secret ingredient was.  Turns out it was a tiny pinch of cardamom, of all things.  It was the unidentifiable flavor of “manufactured cookie” that I pretended to loathe but secretly loved.  If I had put a pinch of cardamom in these CCC, Immature Style, they would taste exactly like the Chewy Chips Ahoy.  I hope my sister is reading this, because she knows what I’m talkin’ about.