Betty Crocker's
Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients:
2 1/4 cups Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup coarsely chopped nuts, if desired
Instructions:
1. Heat oven to 375°F. In small bowl, mix flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.
2. In large bowl, beat softened butter and sugars with electric mixer on medium speed, or mix with spoon about 1 minute or until fluffy, scraping side of bowl occasionally.
3. Beat in egg and vanilla until smooth. Stir in flour mixture just until blended (dough will be stiff). Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.
4. Onto ungreased cookie sheets, drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart.
5. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until light brown (centers will be soft). Cool 2 minutes; remove from cookie sheet to cooling rack. Cool completely, about 30 minutes. Store covered in airtight container.
Tips:
1. Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies turn out best when baked one sheet at a time on middle oven rack.
2. The best cookie sheets are shiny aluminum with a smooth surface and no sides. These cookie sheets reflect heat, which helps cookies to bake evenly and brown properly. Rimmed baking sheets will not provide the same results in cookie baking.
3. For best results, measure ingredients accurately using the right measuring equipment for the ingredient being measured. Make sure to add ingredients in the order they are called for.
4. The best way to measure flour for this Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe is to first stir the flour a bit before spooning into the measuring cup. Fill until heaping and then sweep the excess off the top with the flat edge of a butter knife.
5. Line flat cookie sheets with parchment paper for easy cleanup. Make sure to give the dropped dough plenty of air space so that the cookies won’t bump into each other as they spread.
6. Baking science determines what makes a soft, chewy cookie versus a crisp, crunchy cookie. Factors that make a difference include the ratio and type of sugars used, the amount of butter or shortening used, and how much flour is stirred in.
7. Use a 1-inch meat baller (or cookie/ice cream scoop) to make Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies that are uniform in shape and size.
8. Want to make jumbo-size Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies? Use a measuring cup or cookie/ice cream scoop to scoop out cookie dough, dropping each scoop 3 inches apart. Bake until edges of cookies are set (centers will be soft).
9. This Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe can be customized with endless flavor combinations. Just replace the chocolate chips and nuts with the same amount of the new ingredients you want to add. Try adding macadamia nuts and white vanilla baking chips, or pack a double punch of peanut flavor with peanut butter chips and chopped peanuts. Make salted butterscotch-pecan cookies by swapping in butterscotch chips and chopped pecans, and then sprinkling with coarse salt before baking.
Recipe Websites:
Food Network: This site's strength is that it offers many different recipe options for visitors, ranging from dinners to desserts. There are photos of each which help with choosing between recipes. However, upon first arriving at the site, it is difficult to decide where to go in order to find the exact type of recipe you are looking for. Because Food Network has chefs, shows, shopping, and more, it takes a bit longer to find exactly what you are looking for.
Delish: The images on this page are massive, making it difficult to navigate from one recipe to the next. While the site is more specifically focused on food, it has links to articles regarding celebrities and food, foods to eat to be healthier, etc. Out of the three recipe sites I picked, this was my least favorite.
Southern Living Recipes: Because Southern Living is a magazine, this site has much more to offer than just recipes; it includes homes, food in general, gardening, traveling, culture, style, and more. Once finding the recipe tab, the site's simplistic style makes it very easy to view each recipe individually; once they find the correct tab, viewers are not as overwhelmed by the mass of information offered. Upon clicking on a specific recipe, viewers are given the main information they need at the very top of the page.
Non-Recipe Websites:
Anthropologie: The top navigation bar on this site is very effective. It has created a sizeable list of categories of information without being overwhelming. When mousing over the category names, users can select a more specified category to search. I think this style of searching would work well for recipes.
New York Times: The home page of this site can be a bit overwhelming upon first glance largely due to the content that is listed on it (news). However, if this information was replaced with recipes, it would be a nice way of displaying many different available recipes on the site so that viewers can see the range of available information given to them when choosing to browse this site.
VSCO: The way that VSCO focuses on images is something that I think could be very successful for recipe displays. People tend to choose food based on the way it looks, so images are a great thing to emphasize when displaying images. Once choosing an image, VSCO allows user to click on the image to read more textual information relating to the image.
