Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've made chocolate chip cookies a few times before (and, honestly, I'm still looking for the 'perfect' recipe) so in order to complete this book in one year I quickly followed Mrs Beeton's recipe for chocolate chip cookies whilst I waited for an Apple Loaf to bake.

Spoiler alert: Mrs Beeton's recipe is not perfect.

Required ingredients

Mixing the ingredients follows the same basic practice as all baking. Dry ingredients, followed by wet ingredients, mix everything together.

The recipe in the book doesn't talk about chilling the cookie dough, but every baker knows that chilling the dough is the best way to end up with soft chewy cookies, so I deviated and popped the dough in the fridge for 30min.

After some chillin' (during which I made the Apple Loaf), I used two teaspoons to portion the dough onto a baking tray.

12 minutes later I had soft cookies, albeit quite messy and un-uniform.

They taste GREAT warm from the oven, and stayed soft when they'd cooled too. Although I think Mrs Beeton is a bit stingy with the choc chips - I prefer a lot more chocolate.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

150g plain flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

100g butter

50g caster sugar

50g soft light brown sugar

1 egg, beaten

1/2 tsp vanilla essense

75g chocolate chips

Grease two or three baking sheets. Set the oven at 180C / gas 4. Mix the flour, salt and bicarb.

Beat the butter until soft, add the sugars and continue to beat until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla essence. Stir in the flour and chocolate chips.

Using a teaspoon, scoop up a little of the dough. Use a second teaspoon to transfer the dough to the baking sheet. Make the heaps about 2 inches apart.

Bake the biscuits for 10-12 minutes, until golden. Leave to stand for 5 minutes, then cool on a wire rack.