The Secret to My Chocolate Chip Cookies

For as long as I can remember, I have loved chocolate chip cookies.  They're my favorite dessert, favorite snack, favorite road-trip treat, favorite pre-dinner snitch, favorite stress food, favorite anytime anywhere goody.  And I'm not particularly picky about them - you put a chocolate chip cookie in front of me and I will eat it.  I'll probably eat many, in fact, because my body has a high tolerance for sweets in general and for chocolate chip cookies in particular.  I do, however, have a special place in my tummy for soft, somewhat gooey, well-shaped cookies.  And that's what I've worked to master in the last several years - the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

I credit my Grandma Clark with feeding my love for these delectable treats.  She makes good chocolate chip cookies and always has them on hand, which is a sign of a great grandma!  And she's the one who taught me some tricks of the trade, like adding oats to the dough, and freezing already-made cookies which become nice and soft when they begin to thaw.  So I owe a special thanks to Grandma for helping me in my search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

After many attempts and alterations of recipes, I've discovered that the best recipe in the world is the one on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip bag.  Seriously.  When people ask what recipe I use and I say Nestle, they balk at me.  "Surely not!" they say.  Everyone's tried that recipe a hundred times and the cookies come out flat and/or crispy and/or simply not perfect.  But it's true.  That's the recipe I use...with a few interpretations along the way.

Here are my main recommendations for baking the perfect chocolate chip cookies:

1) Do not use a mixer.  Mixing by hand is important.
2) Pull butter straight out of the fridge and only slightly soften it.
3) Add approximately 1/2 Cup of oats to the dough.

So, here's a step-by-step of what I do (with less-than-ideal pictures since I baked this batch at night and there wasn't any natural light available):

Start with the wet ingredients.  (Note that the brown sugar available here in Kenya is the dark molasses kind, so my cookies here always look darker than usual.)

Mix all the wet ingredients together.  The butter should be in thick clumps, since it's pulled straight out of the fridge and only put in the microwave for 10-15 seconds to soften.  The butter won't be completely mixed in until you add the dry ingredients.  It takes a long time to mix the butter all the way.

Add the dry ingredients and slowly mix everything together.  It should be hard to mix it by hand because the butter is so firm still.  I often give my arm a break at some point because it definitely hurts my arm/hand/wrist to mix it this way.

The dough should be thick and sticky.  Thick dough is a huge reason the cookies end up with the texture I like best.

See that streak of butter in the dough?  That's a good sign that the butter wasn't too soft when I started.  It's normal to find chunks of butter that still need to be mixed in even when the dough seems like it should be done.

When the butter is finally completely mixed in, add about 1/2 Cup of oats.  That's an approximation because I tend to dump in whatever looks good - just enough to add more texture to the cookies but not so much to make them oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

Finally, add those beautiful chocolate chips!  Use at least a whole bag of chips.  The Nestle recipe actually calls for more than a whole bag, which I highly agree with, but here in Kenya where chocolate chips are nowhere to be found except in Nairobi at $7/bag, I stick with just one bag of chips per batch of cookies.  (The missionaries here always pack chocolate chips in their luggage when coming this way because they're either nonexistent or just too expensive to buy here.)

When the dough is done, it should look like this.  Thick and sticky.

Then spoon them onto a cookie sheet and use your fingers to give them a general ball-shaped figure.  Do not flatten them.  They'll bake in the middle just the way they're meant to.

Mmmmmm.....

Pop them in the oven at 375 for 8-10 minutes and voila!  I always check them at 8 minutes and keep checking them every 30 seconds or so after that in order to pull them out at just the right time.  Cookies tend to bake really fast at the end and it's always a bummer to overbake them.  And every oven is different so you need to know your oven!

They should look soft and a bit doughy.  They'll keep baking for a bit on the hot cookie sheet even after they're pulled out of the oven.

This is my perfect chocolate chip cookie.  Full of chips, lumpy texture, and the slightest bit doughy underneath.  Mmmmm......

Oh, and I'll often make half the dough into balls and put 'em in the freezer.  Because frozen cookie dough is one of life's greatest pleasures!

So there you have it.  For everyone who's asked me, that's my secret.  Baking chocolate chip cookies has become a coping mechanism for me here in Kenya.  I've never baked them more frequently than I have here, which is ironic since chocolate chips are like gold around here because they're so hard to come by.  But other missionaries and short-term visitors have been very gracious and given me chocolate chips many times.  They know it's one of my things, and they know I'll share cookies if they share their chocolate chips :)  So it's a good deal.  And I haven't lost any more of the baby weight I was still trying to lose before we moved here, but at least I have a way to cope with some of the stress of living in a developing country!

Crazy About Chameleons

These creatures are everywhere around here.

And we very much like to hold them and feed them flies and watch them change colors.

And they very much like to climb up things, like window screens and pant legs and skirts.

And it's particularly fun when Daddy Horn comes home and discovers another chameleon in our midst.

These creatures are everywhere around here and make fantastic little pets!

Trip to Kericho

Last Saturday we took a day trip to Kericho, a town about an hour-and-a-half away.  I really needed to go somewhere, anywhere, and it seemed like a good place to go.  So off we went, driving ourselves!  We currently have a car because another WGM family asked us to be responsible for their car while they're on HMA this year.  We didn't anticipate using it much, but it offers a lot of freedom and, as it turns out, costs about the same to drive ourselves as it does to hire a driver (if all 5 of us are going somewhere).  So we're getting acclimated to driving around Kenya, on the left side of the road.  It's been great!

Kericho is in the heart of tea country and it is beautiful.  The rolling hills are green and lush, and tea fields are everywhere.  Watching workers pick tea leaves in the fields is somehow picturesque.  Tea production is an important part of the economy in Kenya and it's encouraging to know that the tea industry is doing well.

One of the reasons we ventured to Kericho was to check out the Chagaik Arboretum.  It turned out to be a lovely place, like a small park.  It's just past town and is known to have troops of monkeys.  We had prepped the kids with the notion that we'd see colobus monkeys and vervet monkeys, but there was nary a monkey to be seen.  There were a lot of people making a lot of noise at the time, so perhaps that's why they weren't around.  It must be normal to see them, however, because there were even signs warning against hunting vervet monkeys.  Oh well.  Maybe next time!

We did, however, discover this tiny frog hopping through the grass.  Caleb and Kai were enthralled, and Caleb quickly named him Fall (not sure why).  This poor frog suffered at the hands of our children for about an hour before we put him by the river.  I hope a bird or other creature snatched him up quickly because he was very near death by the time Caleb was done "protecting him from predators."  Caleb said many many times on the ride home how much he missed his froggy friend Fall.

While Caleb played with the frog, Kai wasted no time finding a place to dig.  That boy is obsessed with dirt.  I mean, obsessed.  If it looks like there's no dirt to be found, I can guarantee he will find some anyway, and be willing to wander in order to find it.  I swear he's got a homing device for dirt.

Eli carried Asa around for a bit and garnered way too many stares and laughs.  We learned awhile ago that men simply DO NOT carry babies on their backs.  That's the woman's way to carry a baby.  So whenever we go places and Eli puts Asa on his back, we get stared and laughed at, and some people have even whipped out their phones to take a picture because they think it's so funny.  This particular time we were too annoyed to handle any more attention than usual, so after letting him crawl around in the grass for awhile I put Asa on my back instead.

Asa loves being outside and crawling around.  He does not like to be held when he's outside.  There's too much to explore and he squawks or screams when we pick him up.

Near the river were these giant bamboo shoots.  I'm not sure if they're native to Kenya or not, although I'm inclined to think not.  The arboretum had trees from around the world and they were even labeled!  (Signage is not one of Kenya's strong suits.)  So perhaps this bamboo was transplanted from somewhere else.  Regardless, it was fun to see real bamboo!

After the arboretum we headed back into town and ate lunch at a restaurant that had chicken nuggets on the menu.  Then we stopped at Nakumatt (which is sort of like a small Walmart) to get things like milk and butter and berries.  All in all, it was a great day.  We did have one puke episode in the car -we've discovered that Kai is capable of getting carsick - but otherwise it was a fun day of getting away from the hospital and exploring another part of Kenya.  We love to travel and explore, so it did our hearts good!  And since Kericho is so close, and since it has a place to buy things like milk and butter and berries, we'll probably be going back periodically in the future.

Snapshot

There's not much to report on the homefront these days.  It's very quiet around here since multiple missionary families left for HMA (home ministry assignment), so the boys and I spend most of our days in and around the house, taking the occasional walk to check the mailbox or buy something at the dukas (shops) and waiting for Eli to come home from the hospital.  It's busy enough chasing these rascals around, but overall the past month has been rather uneventful.

We did, however, accomplish taking a photo of all three boys for the first time in a few months.  Now that is exciting!  It's not easy to do, and getting all three to look at the same time is virtually impossible, not to mention looking at the same time whilst also smiling.  But this is close enough and captures these boys' personalities fairly well.  So here's a snapshot from the week: