Every year for Christmas we make chocolate chip cookies. It's tradition. I say we, but for the past several years it's primarily me who mixes them and bakes them, with some help from the rest of my family. We had to use M&Ms last year since we couldn't find chocolate chips at the store (on Christmas Eve when we looked), so my mom made sure to buy her chocolate chips early this year. She sprung for the Ghirardelli semi-sweet chips, and we decided to just use the recipe on the back of the bag.
The chocolate chip cookie recipe can be found on the Ghirardelli website. This recipe has equal parts brown and granulated sugars, 2.5 cups flour, and 2 eggs. It also has 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract - which is double vanilla! It takes a full teaspoon of baking soda for leavening, and ½ teaspoon of salt - this is more than what went into the cookies last year. I used the electric hand mixer (affiliate link) to blend together the margarine and sugars, followed by eggs and vanilla. I stirred in the flour and leavening until just mixed, and then added the full bag of chocolate chips by hand. I dropped then by smallish tablespoon-fuls onto an ungreased baking sheet, and baked them 10 minutes at 375F to get the edges to start to brown. The recipe was supposed to make 48, but I made 41.
The picture above doesn't do these cookies justice. They were very tasty cookies. The double vanilla extract made the cookie dough itself particularly rich and delicious. The cookies were flaky and tender; I think that using the electric hand mixer (affiliate link) helped achieve this. 10 minutes was enough to get a perfectly chewy cookie since I made them a little larger than called for. Of course, the delicious chocolate shone through as well. We were all very happy with these cookies, with their great texture and rich flavor. These may be the best chocolate chip cookies we've made in recent years, and it's a recipe worth making again.
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