Morning Dew: I just wanted traditional chocolate chip cookies!!

You know when you have one of those not-so-good days and you just want to feel better, or get your roommate to cheer up from her terrible students in middle school, and you just want to make great chocolate chip cookies?! Yes, yesterday I was craving a simple traditional chocolate chip cookie.. so I went on the internet and google "CCC recipe" and up came a recipe from AllRecipes. I like this site so I trusted it.. and it had good reviews.

... so my roommate and I decided to try this. The recipe called for the following ingredients (you can google it yourself)

and here we go, just baking... la la la la la... added the sugars (2 CUPS) with melted butter, later the eggs (2 EGGS) , and you know.. throw in some 2 TSP of vanilla extract.. with some 3 c of flour. All right, well we must not have been on our guard because when we finished our cookie batter was very liquidy. BUT we went along with it anyways.. I mean the recipe called for us to "dissolve baking soda in hot water" and we figured it was just a nice trick since we had never really come across that before. Here's what came out!

It's difficult to tell, but the cookies came out LOOKING like big, thick toasty cookies, and when you tapped them, they would crumble and fall because there was absolutely nothing inside. It was very deceiving.

deceiving cookie >_<

Seriously, there was nothing inside. I know they look huge. And they were way too sugary. Anyways, I had to throw it all away because (1) it was extremely sweet, and (2) you weren't actually eating anything...

After this (being the engineer that I am..) I compared the ingredients from this recipe with Nestle's.

Okay, they're not THAT different..so why were my cookies so empty inside? Nestle's recipe results in about a dozen more cookies with less granulated and brown sugar, 1 less egg, and no water, and less flour (of course, because of the less sugar amount). Hmm.. what went wrong?

This made me upset, especially because I love to bake and I "thought" I was a good baker! So, the next day (today) I decided to try a new recipe from a book I own, In the Small Kitchen by Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine. Its a great book, I love it. Anyways, they have a "classic chocolate chip cookies" recipe (p.180). So, I had to try one more time...

So here are the ingredient differences. Notice that this recipe doesn't require any vanilla extract :) even better.. we had to borrow some from our neighbors yesterday, and since we couldn't 'pay' them back with cookies we didn't have to use more of their vanilla this time. hehe.