Day Twenty Five: Tis the Season

I’ve started the grand cookie adventure again. I’m looking for a few good cookie recipes so I can make up some cookie gift bags for Christmas.

I stumbled into this recipe last week from some comments on another blog (no idea which one, but the author was looking for a way to get moist cookies). I bookmarked it because it looked interesting, and I’ve given it a few tries this past week.

Basically, the recipe is the same as the Tollhouse recipe except that you add a small box of Instant Pudding after you cream the butter and sugar together. The first time, I tried the recipe as written on the main page with Vanilla Pudding and dark chocolate chips. They look really good, don’t they? My first bite, I almost spit the cookie out. WhatsHisFace couldn’t get enough of them though. I checked the comments on the recipe, and several folks suggested adding salt and more vanilla (and sometimes a little baking powder). I tried salting the last three sheets of cookies, and it seemed to help a little bit.

So I decided to try it again. I used a Chocolate Fudge pudding mix, peanut butter chips, and I added the salt, baking powder, and a Tablespoon of vanilla. This time, the pudding mixed up with the butter and sugars into something not unlike cement. I kept going though (because I’m stubborn like that).

It turns out that the Vanilla pudding was the 3.4oz size recommended in the recipe. The Chocolate Fudge pudding (same brand) was 3.9oz. The mixing directions for the pudding called for the same amount of milk, but the puddings obviously mixed up differently in the cookies.

I didn’t think I could add liquid at this point, and I decided to try baking one batch to see how dry they came out. They totally fooled me. The cookies came out moist, fudgy, and with just the right amount of peanut butter. I could have eaten about a dozen of them. So I went ahead and baked the entire batch. The only problem was that they dried out as they cooled. By the time I got them onto the plate and tried one, they’d turned into something about one step up from a hockey puck. (Okay, not quite that bad, but nothing like the fantastic cookie straight out of the oven.)

So I’ve got some more experimenting to do with this recipe before I’ll add it into the rotation or decide to scrap it. My first instinct is to try the Chocolate Fudge again, only holding some of the dry pudding mix out. Or maybe adding some peanut butter like one of the commenters suggested.