As a senior graduating this spring, the Sunday scaries hit differently. Giving my best attempt to maintain a balance of school work, personal projects and somehow staying sane through it all — every day of the week tends to be scary.
The scariest thing of them all is being asked what are your job plans post-grad on a Sunday. For starters, I do not dream of labor, nor do I have any plans for it — at least at the moment.
But if I answered truthfully with no limit as to what I could do, it would be working in a test kitchen. If one day this dream comes true and I had to pitch a recipe as my interview for this role, it would be these brown butter chocolate chip cookies — with a few tweaks and customizations to make the recipe my own.
But we haven’t gotten there yet — so here is how to make the ultimate brown butter chocolate chip cookies to cure your Sunday scaries.
The process:
Preheat your oven to 375℉ and line your baking pan with parchment paper (or a silicone baking mat if you choose to be environmentally conscious today).
Begin with browning one stick of butter over medium heat in a small saucepan. If you have never done this before, what are you doing? Browned butter is truly one of the easiest ways to level up any baked good. Here is an easy tutorial to walk you through it!
Once the butter is browned, transfer it to a bowl to cool.
In a second bowl, combine the following ingredients and beat together. This is the step where I miss my KitchenAid stand mixer the most:
- 1 cup brown sugar
- ½ granulated sugar
- 1 stick softened butter
Once those ingredients are combined, add two eggs and 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract. Mix again, until a luscious, smooth, buttery sugar mixture is formed.
Next, grab another bowl, add the following dry ingredients and combine:
- 2 cups + 2 tablespoons flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
Finally, the most important element of any chocolate chip cookie recipe is the chocolate. I am a proud hater of chocolate chips and will not use them if I’m given the option not to.
Chocolate bars are the only viable options for baking. Not only do they melt throughout the baking process better, but they also feel fancy to chop up.
For this recipe, I used two bars of semisweet chocolate. The chocolate type is completely up to preference, I think dark chocolate would be fantastic in this — but I would avoid milk chocolate for these cookies.
Once your brown butter is cooled, the butter and sugar mixture is combined, dry ingredients set aside and the chocolate chopped, you’re ready to assemble your cookie dough.
You will want to first slowly mix the cooled brown butter and butter-sugar mixture.
Then, gradually add the flour mixture to the brown butter-sugar mixture in three increments. It would be advisable to use a bigger bowl than I did!
Once the flour and butter-sugar mixture are combined, fold in your chopped chocolate.
Now that’s a good cookie dough.
The next step is the most difficult — the waiting time. Place your bowl of cookie dough into your refrigerator for at least 15 minutes. Trust me on this one — I have skipped this step before and the cookies did not set correctly! After the 15 minutes is up, scoop your cookies and bake for about 10 minutes.
Now this is optional, but I would recommend sprinkling flakey salt on top of the cookies as soon as they come out of the oven.
The finished, stunning cookies you will be left with:
