World's Greatest Cookie. Mrs. V. Moore, Salem's Favorite Recipes.

1 attempt in 4 parts.

Recipe:
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 cups flour
1 tsp soda
1 bag of chocolate chips

In large bowl cream together until smooth peanut butter and butter. Gradually add sugar and brown sugar. Add eggs one at a time until smooth. In another bowl, mix flour and soda. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. drop by spoonfuls onto baking sheet and flatten slightly with back of spoon. Bake at 325 for 10 to 12 minutes. Makes 6-7 dozen.





Now, don't get me wrong... these cookies are good, but hardly worth of the title "World's Greatest Cookie". Unless you're this guy...






This dough was very simple to throw together... no fancy ingredients, no special techniques. What I found to be very frustrating was the baking time. The recipe says 10 to 12 minutes, and I prefer chewy cookies to crunchy cookies so I took them out at 10 minutes... They were just warm, melted dough at that point. I put them back in for 2 more minutes and there was not much improvement. 3 more minutes (a total of 15 at this point) and the cookies were undercooked but somewhat holding together to the point I took 3 off to cool, and put the rest back in the oven for 3 more (18 total) minutes. It was at this point I realized I skipped a step. I had not flattened the dough before baking them.

The next sheet I put in the oven for 15 minutes, and I made sure I flattened the cookies this time. They came out very, very golden-brown and very, very crispy. So the final 2 trays were both flattened and baked for only 12 minutes.

The final result? Major differences based on how the cookies are baked. Batch 1a (15 minutes, unflattened) were, what I consider, perfect after they had completely cooled. Chewy, but don't fall apart when you pick them up. Batch 1b (18 minutes, unflattened) were also good, though much more crunchy than you'd expect. Batch 2 (15 minutes, flattened) I did not care for at all. They has a texture like shortbread, but if crunchy cookies are your thing, then this might be what you'd want to try. The final 2 batches turned out pretty well, but not as good as those first 3 I took out of the oven early from batch 1a.

After looking over the recipe, there is a LOT of sugar, which I suppose accounts for the major difference between the warm cookies and the completely cooled cookies. If I were to repeat this recipe in the future, I would only bake them for 12 minutes and I don't believe I would flatten the dough either as that also seems to have contributed to a very crunchy end-product. I do think this would be a great recipe if you're baking with kids, since the measurements are so straightforward, and it's pretty hard to mess up this dough.