Home and Gardening With Liz: Molasses

August 25, 2012

Molasses saves the day!

The other day I decided to make homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Once I started gathering my ingredients I realized I had run out of light brown sugar. I didn't want to run to the grocery store and was going to trash the idea. Then I remembered reading that you can make your own!

So I Googled it and sure enough there were lots recipes for making your own light and dark brown sugar. I didn't think to look it up in my cookbook but it's probably there too!

I used my mini chopper to spin the sugar and molasses together. It worked quite well! You could smell the molasses but it didn't taste any different.

The recipe I used was right off the package of Ghirardelli's semi-sweet

chocolate chips package. I also used the same mini chopper to chop up the pecans for the recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yield:

4 dozen cookies

Ingredients:

11 ¹/₂ ounces Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
³/₄ cup sugar
³/₄ cup brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 ¹/₄ cups unsifted flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
¹/₂ teaspoon salt
1 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped (optional)

Directions

Heat oven to 375ºF.

Stir flour with baking soda and salt; set aside. In large mixing bowl, beat butter with sugar and brown sugar at medium speed until creamy and lightened in color. Add eggs and vanilla, one at a time. Mix on low speed until incorporated. Gradually blend dry mixture into creamed mixture. Stir in nuts and chocolate chips. Drop by tablespoon onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown.

They turned out a little flatter than I wanted (the kitchen was very warm- I think if I had put the batch in the fridge for a half hour it would have made a difference) but the taste is great- I put 1/2 of them into a the freezer. This way they won't go stale and I might think twice about eating yet another one! HA!

I'm the original cookie monster!