Chocolate Chip Cookies
When I was 8 years old and at school our class made a classroom cookbook which I still treasure; along with my friends who remain great friends even today. This cookie recipe is from there and belonged to one of my mother’s great friends Debbie Wilson. As a child I was especially close to her daughter Jamie and we spent so many happy times together. Jamie follows on here and she’s a mum now too, so I hope she’ll see this and smile.
We lived in London during the week and went to school but on the weekends my parents would drive us to the country, where they rented a cottage in a village called Ashton, in Northamptonshire. I made these cookies a lot with my mum usually on Saturday mornings, at one point maybe even weekly. As kids we were just as used to eating the cookie dough as the cookies themselves. Those times were the happiest and the taste of these cookies takes me back to then.
ingredients
recipe makes a lot of cookies
230g unsalted softened butter
3/4 cup brown sugar (I have already reduced the sugar as my mum did too, but you could use just 1/2 cup and it would still be very sweet - you decide)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups dark and semi-sweet chocolate chips
method
Preheat the oven to 160C fan oven. Cream together the butter and both sugars until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla extract and mix well. Sift together the dry ingredients, then stir into the wet mixture until thoroughly mixed. Add the chocolate chips. Form the dough into golf balls.
Bake on a lined tray, on the middle rack of the oven, for 15-20 minutes, depending on the size of the cookies. Remove from the oven, and leave to cook on a baking sheet before serving with a glass of milk.