I’ve been on a bit of a cookie kick recently.

When you don’t have the time or patience to be learning a new style of cooking or baking, cookies are perfect.  With minimal effort and ingredients you can have a delicious dessert ready to eat in less than an hour, and plenty left over to take to work or share with friends.  When I get the baking itch but don’t have the time to do anything complicated, I get the itch for cookies.  And you know who has killer cookie recipes?  The awesome Joy (the Baker).

Cookies + Robots

One of the nice things I’ve noticed recently is after several years of baking on a pretty regular basis, if I suddenly feel like whipping something up, I typically have the ingredients to do so.  There’s always a stick or two of butter floating around in the fridge and I don’t remember the last time I ran out of flour and sugar.  At this point in my “baking career” (don’t I sound fancy?) it’s simply habit to pick up a fresh bag of either whenever I notice I’m starting to run low.  If I want to do something more that the basics I usually have to make a quick trip to the store, but if it’s something simple, I’m more than likely good to go.

In this case of baking itchery (which sounds much worse than I actually mean it to), all I wanted was some cookies and gosh-darn it if I wasn’t going to have any.  I have a basic go-to chocolate chip recipe in a book my brother got me years ago, but I was feeling like trying something new.  Then began the balance of “what ingredients do I have?” and “what’s a small step up from plain ‘ole chocolate chip?”  A run to Joy’s web site found me exactly what I craved: Chewy Molasses Chocolate Chip.

Homemade Brown Sugar

You might be saying to yourself “Mary, do you really keep molasses in your pantry?”  The answer is no, not really.  BUT a couple months (er…probably more like a year? >.>) ago I used some once in a long-forgotten recipe, so the rest of the jar still lurked on the back of a shelf.  This recipe only requires 1/4 cup, so I was good to go.

The only thing this recipe called for that I didn’t have at the time was bread flour.  Typically I only keep all-purpose in the pantry, so I decided I’d give it a whirl with just that.  In the end they turned out just fine.  Actually, the pictures you see are from the second batch I made in which I actually used bread flour.  The only difference was that the bread flour’d cookies were slightly less flat, a little bulkier.  Which makes sense if you know the basics of flour, I guess.

BEEP.

You may (or may not) notice the nifty plate featured in my pictures.  That plate is from my friend Kate who randomly brought them to me one day.  “I saw these and thought of you,” she said, and I have been looking for a baked good to put upon them ever since.  These cookies seemed like the right choice.

You may (or may not) ALSO notice that these pictures look a little clearer than usual.  That is because, my friends, I have finally crossed into the world of GROWNUP CAMERAS.  My friend Emily (from last year’s Wedsplosion, you may recall) was recently looking to sell an older DSLR and a couple lenses.  Knowing that she would probably give me a good deal and that whatever equipment she had was sure to be of good quality, I immediately submitted a bid, which she kindly accepted.  So now I have a fancy camera.  Please, bear with me while I learn to use it and the EPIC macro lens I also bought from her.  It’s a little intense, and I sort of feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, but gosh DARNIT if the pictures already look way better than with my old point’n’shoot.

Good & Good For You

Anyway, these cookies are sweet and caramel-y and I’m pretty sure contain some sort of addictive substance I didn’t previously know about.  Be prepared to either eat all of them or have friends around to take them away from you.  Even the batter is delicious, so watch yourselves, friends!

JtB’s Chewy Molasses Chocolate Chip Cookies

From Joy the Baker!

Mary Gezo

Formerly of both n00bcakes and !Blog, the two magically become one on Spatialdrift; expect some lazy baking and serious nerditude. Also, I love semicolons.