The Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Recipe

Written by Roar Elias

Here is a chocolate cookie recipe to show you how you can take a basic recipe and have some fun with it. I really believe to have fun with baking and cooking, you have to make an adventure out of it. If you are going to follow a recipe word for word then there is no way for the creativity to flow.

Learning to work in the kitchen is the best way for kids to develop their imagination. What better way to start off with, than a chocolate cookie recipe! This is something that not many of us can resist.

Normally a chocolate cookie recipe like this is just a case of basic dough with a couple of chocolate chips mixed in. Something like this will satisfy just about any kid after a long day at school. If you serve this with a glass of milk, it will go down extremely well. However, if we go one step further, thinking of a couple more ingredients, you may be surprised the taste sensations you can get from just one bite.

I decided to experiment with white chocolate, cranberries and hazelnuts and found that this worked really well. I made a couple of friends along the way from the final result and you probably will too so give this one a try!

Cranberry, White Chocolate and Hazelnut Cookies

Ingredients

175g butter
125g brown sugar
5ml vanilla essence
1 egg
1/2 tsp baking powder
225g flour
100g white chocolate, chopped
50g hazelnuts, chopped
100g cranberries

Directions

Set oven to 180 degrees C.
Cream the butter and the sugar
Add the vanilla essence and the egg slowly to the butter mixture
Sift the flour and the baking powder and fold it in to form dough
Add the chocolate, nuts and crushed cranberries
Wrap the mixture in cling film and put it in the fridge for one hour.
Roll the dough into small balls and place them on a baking tray.
Press them down with a fork
Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes.

You can make your cookies as big or small as you want. The trend was always to have these gigantic flying saucers, but fads come and go and I think as parents, most of us will want to go a little easy on the sugar!

Always think of what goes well together. For example orange and chocolate is always a winner. If you are not sure of something, just look it up.

People always love the zesty flavors of citrus. Just take a little orange juice and grate some orange zest then mix it into the dough.

Using good quality ingredients is going to make the end product stand out like you won't believe. You simply can't use regular cooking chocolate. Anything to do with chocolate has to include at least 70% cocoa solids. You will be able to notice the difference in an instant. You will also find that this type of chocolate is so much easier to work with. Cheap chocolate is more likely to split and at the end of the day you are not going to have too much fun in the kitchen. Getting the kids involved is great, but it definitely helps if you make it easy on them and give them good ingredients to work with.