Cookies

While waiting for my husband to arrive home at 4am from a business trip I have decided to think about somethings I love... namely COOKIES!!!
I am usually very picky when it comes to cookies! Fortunately, my friend Mimine from www.miminecuisine.canalblog.com helped me out with that!
Here is her wonderful recipe (with a few changes from me) on how to make delicious cookies that are crunchy outside and soft inside!

What you need to get about 20 cookies:

• 20 min to make the batter
• from 20min to 90min to cook the whole batch depending on how big your oven is!!

• 115g of soft butter
• 220g flour
• 1 egg
• 200g brown sugar
• 2 big spoonful of normal sugar
• a small spoonful of sodium bicarbonate
• a good spoonful of yeast
• a small spoon of salt
• a little bag of vanilla sugar/ or the real vanilla if you have some / or just some extract of vanilla
• 3 big spoonful of expresso (the coffee as is, not the coffee once made with water)

Flavors to choose from:

• 100g of dark chocolate chips
• 100g of white chocolate chips
• 100g of peanut butter chips (mmm these are just so good)
• cinnamon
• nuts (whichever you want)
• coffee beans
• 250g dark, milk or white chocolate
• peanut butter

• a big bowl
• a fork
• a whisk (not an electric one)
• little cups/bowls to melt things in
• a cookie sheet... or 2!

OK!! Now that we are prepared here are the steps to follow:

• Put the butter in the microwave for 5-10seconds. Make sure it doesn't melt completely. It should be pretty soft and easy to work with. 
• In the big bowl, mix the soft butter, the sugar and the brown sugar with a fork. It should be a pretty solid mix, pretty grainy.

• Add the egg, the vanilla and the expresso. 

• Add little by little the flour, the bicarbonate and the salt. Make sure you proceeed slowly on this step. Whisk rapidly. You should end up with a fairly solid batter, not sticky at all and even a bit crumbly like. The reason why I don't use an electric whisk is that the batter being pretty solid, easily attaches to the whisk making it impossible to work with.

• [Optional] if you want more chocolaty cookies, melt the chocolate in a pot and add it to the mix. Whisk well. That should make the batter a bit more sticky. I personally like adding 2 big spoonfuls of peanut butter. It really matches well and gives such a delicious taste.
• Add all your chips/nuts whatever you want! In this case, I only added white chocolate chips as I think they go very well with the peanut butter.

• Preheat your oven to 140°C.

• Take in your hands a bunch of batter and form little balls of 3-4cm diameter. Again this should not be too sticky on your hand and the balls should be able to be formed really easily. If it helps, you can put a bit of flour on your hands.

• Put the balls on a cookie sheet which you buttered beforehand and make sure you leave enough space between them (5-6 cm should be enough).  An alternative to the butter is to use baking paper. For a typical cookie sheet I usually manage to put 9 to 12 cookies on the sheet.

• Put the cookie sheet in the oven, leave it there 20 to 25min. Watch out! Don't leave it more than 25min or it will be burned. 25min is if you want the cookies very crunchy. I typically leave them 22min.

• Once the sheet is out of the oven, wait a good 10min! This is extremely important because your cookie batter is still not cooked inside and if you try to touch the cookies before they cooled down you will just break them apart and can throw them away!
• Once you waited, pick your cookies by hand and put them in a plate apart! The cookies should not have stuck to the cookie sheet, they should not leave any residue on your fingers nor on the sheet!

Note that you should put the bowl with the batter in the fridge while waiting for the first batch to cook. It tends to preserve it better. 

You can keep them a good week as long as you keep them in a dry place (just put them in the family cookie jar they will do wonder... although I doubt they will last that long!)

Needless to say that these cookies are extremely caloric but they are just sooooo good! Have one or two for breakfast with some cold milk and you'll be in happy (sugar buzzed) mood all day long!

Be ready to become addicted!!