Chocolate Makes Everything Better

I am so glad to be back! I have been sick for the past week or so and I am finally ready to get back to the business of eating, writing and exploring!The entire time I was sick I mostly ate pain au chocolat’s thanks to my wonderful boyfriend and the boulanger next door!! I don’t know why, but chocolate just makes everything better! In keeping with that tradition I decided to try my hand at making chocolate chip cookies again. Unfortunately I had previously attempted to make them and they didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. First of all let me back up, you would think that upon finding the most amazing chocolate chips, one would be able to run to the monoprix and snatch up everything they needed to make the most awesome chocolate chip cookies EVER!! Nope….not me! I think between the two of us it took about 15 minutes just to find the baking soda. Thank goodness I had done research so when confronted with the many different types of flour I knew exactly what to get. The 55 flour in France is the closest to our all-purpose flour. They also do not carry vanilla extract like I am used to, it is like this sort of vanilla bean sugar??? So when I went about making my cookies there was definitely some confusion. Lucky for me wine is pretty cheap and easy to find, so it was going on this great cookie adventure too!

My first attempt I followed my recipe to the T. I am not sure if it was the flour or the fact that my oven kept shutting off whenever it felt like it, but my first batch came out like lumps of coal. They were like dense cake/ cookie balls. They weren’t inedible and in fact my boyfriend loved them. God bless him! Being a pastry chef this was just not acceptable, I was determined to figure out this vanilla, flour, baking soda nonsense. Not to mention my Sabatour, the oven! With a few adjustments to the amount of flour and a little extra vanilla and baking soda they came out better the second time around.

I guess it all depends on how you like your chocolate chip cookies, but chewy with a slightly crispy edge is exactly how I like them! C’est Parfait!!