Dough!

I have 1/3 batches of 5 different Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes chilling in either the fridge or freezer. It was fun to make a bunch of doughs back to back and I really appreciated some of the minute differences in the recipes that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Like creaming butter and sugar - the butter needs to be chilled, chopped into chunks, and it has to happen for at least 4 min. I've definitely been undercreaming my butter. I also had confirmed what i had always suspected - that I much prefer cookies with all brown sugar to those that incorporate white sugar. Makes me miss my super dark brown sugar from London. My next task to figuring out how to bake up all of these little darlings as they need different oven temps and different cooking times, but I still want to eat them warm :) I think I'm going to aim to bake them sometime after a full day of hiking, rock climbing, and maybe a 12K run - this is a lot of cookies. Here are my notes so far:

1. Ultimate Stand Mixer Cookie - supposedly written by a Unix programmer, and absolutely fabulous. The egg adding and chilling technique made these take a little longer, but it was worth it. L and I couldn't resist all the cookies in the house this weekend and baked two of these up. They looked just like the photo and were incredible.

2. Carla Rollins' Chocolate Chip - a melted, but not browned butter cookie. Very soft dough, I'm concerned they might expand and get thing in the oven.

3. Alton Brown "The Chewy" - These are fairly close to the original toll house recipe, but eliminate an egg white, use more brown sugar, melt the butter, and add milk. I didn't think you'd be able to taste it, but the milky flavor added depth and a nice softness to the dough. I'm looking forward to baking these.

4. Giant Chocolate Chip Heath Bar Cookies - a drier dough, perfect for lots of mix-ins.

5. NY Times Chocolate Chip Cookie - I've always wanted to try this but never had the excuse. This dough uses more white sugar to brown sugar and hence tasted a bit like sugar cookie dough. The cake flour added a lighter texture, as did the baking powder, and I used regular flour instead of bread flour.

All the cookies have guittard chocolate chips, no nuts, and no add-ins such as orange zest (except the Heath Bar cookies which have, you know, Heath Bars).