Brad and I had a cookie bakeoff last Friday night for our date night in. It started awhile back when Brad made himself our resident cookie baker. Since the beginning of March, he has baked chocolate chip cookies using the Hershey’s Chipits recipe for the perfect chocolate chip cookie, twice. And the cookies turned out great! They remained moist, a bit chewy, and were the perfect size.
Last year some time, I bought myself the Fraiche Food Full Hearts cookbook (more here), and have been meaning to try their recipe for Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies. Brad and I were looking for date night ideas, since we have to stay in right now—man, how I miss our babysitter—and we decided not only to make dessert together, but to test these two recipes against one another.
The final two cookies - Fraiche Food Full Hearts Vegan Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
v Hershey's Chipits Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie.
Whose do you think is whose?
Going into the cookie bakeoff, Brad was confident that he was going to win. He was so sure that he had perfected the recipe and didn’t think there was any way his cookies weren’t going to come out on top.
Technically they did. But I’ll get to that later.
We started with my recipe, since the oven was set to a lower temperature. Talk turned to sabotage almost right off the bat … and even though it wasn’t me that brought it up, I still trusted my potential saboteur to mix the wet ingredients for me, using our hand mixer, as suggested.
The cookies were vegan, using vegan butter and almond milk. They turned out great, in my opinion, but the one thing that I would do differently when I make them again is to use a bigger cookie scoop! The recipe makes 12-15 large cookies, but the cookie scoop that I have made 20 cookies that turned out a little on the thin side. Still, they were chewy and delicious!
Next up ...
Brad’s cookies. To keep things fair, Brad mixed the wet ingredients for his cookies as well, but he decided to branch out from his usual process and used the hand mixer on his batch as well. Big mistake. His cookies fell extremely flat and stuck together. They still tasted fine, but were not the plump, gooey cookies that he had proven the master of. We both erred on the side of my cookies winning, though I guess Brad never said that out loud. And I doubt I’d be able to get him to admit that now.
To be fair, we decided that Archer would taste-test the cookies the next day and pick his favourite. Since my cookies were topped with a bit of course-ground sea salt, I had a hunch that even though Brad’s cookies hadn’t turned out the best, they were going to be the “winner”. And I was right! Archer chose Brad’s cookie almost straight away after tasting it.
You win some, you lose some.
But I still think my cookies were winners.
For the next cookie bakeoff, we’ve decided to tackle a recipe raved about on the blog I follow, Cupcakes and Cashmere. I’m skeptical, and don’t usually make cookies this large (they use a 1/3rd measuring cup to scoop the dough out!), but apparently refrigerating the dough for 36-hours before baking makes these cookies to die for.
I’ll keep ya posted.
Baking scene
My cookies, ready for the oven
Brad's cookies, freshly baked
Drop me some ideas of things to do on date nights in, and let me know what you’ve been up to! We’re certainly spending way less money, but it’s a lot of effort to try and do something special weekly. It’s worth it for our relationship, but I’d be happy for your ideas!
Bake on,
Anya
PS: The last thing we needed was so many darn cookies, but we had a really great time together baking them. 🙂
PPS: My cookie, the vegan one, is pictured on the bottom of the picture at the top of the page. It wins for appearance, right?