the mission for chocolate chip cookies

Chocolate chip cookies are probably the most popular cookies as they are easy to make and always taste delicious. A few years ago I tasted the most delicious chocolate chip cookies at a café in Christchurch. The café was called Metro – I’m not sure that it is there anymore. The cookies were quite fat and had milk chocolate melts in them instead of chocolate chips. They were crispy on the outside but quite soft in the middle. I went on a mission to try and re-create them.

Initially I rang the café and asked if they would divulge the recipe, but they wouldn’t! So then I started making different recipes to see if I could get them as close to the metro ones as possible. In the end I think the closest I got was by substituting some ground almonds for some of the flour in my usual condensed milk recipe, substituting some of the castor sugar with icing sugar, using the larger chocolate melts and making the cookies quite fat and cooking them at a lower temperature for a longer time.

On my chocolate chip cookie travels, I came across a recipe in an old book of my Nana’s for santé biscuits. I tried this recipe making large sized biscuits and the milk chocolate melts. The cookies don’t use condensed milk, so are good for when you don’t have a tin of condensed milk in the cupboard. They have a slight caramel flavour due to the golden syrup. Before we went to Queenstown last week I made some of these biscuits to take down (together with the chocolate and hazelnut biscuits). As well as no condensed milk, I didn’t have any milk chocolate melts either, so I used normal chocolate chips. I made some big ones (pictured above) and some mini ones which were perfect for my friend’s two year old daughter to eat.


Tammy’s chocolate chip cookies

( I haven’t changed the imperial measurements, but 1oz is about 25g)

8 oz butter
8 oz sugar
2 tsp golden syrup
2 tsp milk
12 oz flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 pkt milk chocolate melts or 1 ½ cups chocolate chips

· Soften butter to almost melted and beat in sugar, golden syrup and milk
· Stir in dry ingredients and then chocolate
· Put large balls onto trays and flatten a little
Bake at 150c for 15-20 minutes for large cookies and about 12 minutes for little ones