9/100: Happy birthday Sam!

Today's bake was brought to you by Sam's birthday, which was 1/31! That was also my cousin Katherine's birthday (and you should check out her blog here!) Looks like a lot of awesome people were born on that day, of which I'm quite thankful!

I asked Sam about a month ago what his ultimate favorite baked good was and he said chocolate chip cookies. My roommate Kiley makes raved-about brown butter chocolate chip cookies, so I thought that recipe was the clear choice. Apparently, her friend is a baker at a bake shop (coffee shop??) called Flatline. I should have guessed because the recipe called for 4 cups of flour and 4 cups of butter! I was about to make a lot of cookies Side note: I'm starting to recognize a 1:1:1 ratio between butter and flour and eggs for cookies.  Anyway, I don't know if the recipe is proprietary, so I won't share it online, but if you can bake cookies with browned butter I highly recommend!

The classic ingredient pic

The bake started off pretty normally needing the classic ingredients: vanilla, sugar, flour, butter, rising agent. However, the exciting thing about this recipe was going to be browning butter! I've never browned butter before and I decided not to watch any youtube videos about it, so I was browning butter blind! My roommate Dan has browned butter before, so I was consulting with him constantly asking "is it brown yet?" I shall share my learned secrets with you in picture form:

Butter melting, pretty classic yellow color

The yellow butter will start bubbling everywhere, but it will still be yellow

The butter becomes VERY fragrant and looks brown!

My one secret to browning butter is: when it gets all bubbly hold out until you see the brown. When you see the brown, hold out until it becomes very fragrant. If you can't smell, then hold out for ~30 seconds to one minute to allow all of the butter to brown. After I browned the butter I transferred it to a bowl and put the bowl in the fridge so the butter could cool.

I mixed together all of the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then I started the mixer. I creamed the remaining butter and sugar and added in all the wet ingredients. When the browned butter was cool (it was actually warm, but I got impatient and Kirsten and I agreed it was "cooler" haha) I drizzled it into the batter. I combined all the flour (in 4 separate bolus') and folded in the chocolate chips and what did I have? A whole ton of cookie dough!

This cookie dough definitely passed the cookie dough test. In fact, my roommates can attest to it:

They requested individuals spoons so they could eat the batter straight

I rolled the cookies into tablespoon-sized balls (well, if the tablespoon were to be extended to a round shape, so maybe two tablespoons?) and cooked them for 13 minutes. The temperature and time were actually totally up to me. Kiley asked her baking friend for the temperature and she said: 375?? And the time I simply played by eye. However, these cookies came out PERFECT.

Looks at that perfectly cooked center. Ooey-gooey and delicious!

The cookies were the perfect soft and chewy cookie. Additionally, because I used salted butter the cookies were the perfect sweet and salty balance. They were incredibly easy to eat many of. My friend Vy asked if they were better than the tahini cookies (which she recommended) and I thought they eked out ahead. When she tried them I think she agreed ;)!

The cookie army!

I packed and shipped the cookies to Sam today, so hopefully in two day's time he'll get to taste the genius himself and be the ultimate decider on their deliciousness. This was a super fun recipe to bake and I would absolutely make these cookies again (although is there a half recipe version??). The bake took ~3 hours and I had the excellent company of 5 of my roommates. In the downtime we played "guess that 2000s song" in which Dan would play a song for as long as it took us to name the title. Kylie took down the rap/hip hop songs. Kirsten took down general. I took down the more acoustic/feelings-y/OG Rihanna. As always, it was a blast to have my roommates around baking and taste testing and laughing and sharing with, so thanks roomies! Look forward to hearing whether you like the cookies, Sam! Hope they got to you safely and in cookie-form :) Happy birthday again and share some with Michaela!

Up next: the perfect peanut butter cookie!