Remember Cowboy Cookies?
The chocolate chip cookies with everything including the kitchen sink.
I first heard about Cowboy Cookies a few months back, even though they have been around for at least a generation. Laura Bush submitted this recipe to the Family Circle Bake-Off contest and won against Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, whose recipe was ginger snaps. Four years later, during the second presidential election in 2004, she once again submitted her recipe and beat out Teresa Kerry’s pumpkin spice cookies. The lesson? Once you have a winner, stick to it!
Take away all of the special ingredients—coconut, nuts, oats, dried cherries, and cornflakes—and you are left with the universal cookie conundrum. Cookies are the hardest thing to bake, since they have all of the problems of cakes but they are small, so tiny differences in approach matter. I wanted a thick cookie, not a flat crispy one. I also wanted the cookie itself to be not too buttery or sweet, given the kitchen sink of ingredients.
We started with a recipe from Nicola Lamb, who had worked on the original Laura Bush recipe. The first step was to reduce the amount of brown sugar and the amount of chocolate chips. There was too much of a good thing.
If you can find Lyle’s Golden Syrup, use it here to help browning and make the center a bit chewier. No problem if you cannot find it—just leave it out—I call for just 2 tablespoons. (More syrup makes the cookies spread too much.)
Eggs and butter should be room-temp, but if the butter is cold, just cut it into small pieces. It may take some extra time to cream it in the mixer with the sugars, but it will get there. If the eggs are cold, put them into a small bowl and add hot tap water. Remove after 1 minute and the eggs will be fine.
Corn flakes are added for crunch—just 1 cup—but when I went to the supermarket, they were fresh out! (How can a large grocery chain be out of stock of corn flakes?) I used Rice Krispies instead and they worked great.
This recipe calls for BIG cookies, 3 tablespoons each. I have a drawer full of ice cream scoops in different sizes just for cookies and the like, but you can simply scoop out batter with a large spoon and shape it by hand. For the first one, weigh it—it should be 2 ounces—and then you will have a good idea of size.
I bake cookies one tray at a time; two baking sheets at one time requires a lot of attention and moving the sheets around halfway through. The recipe calls for 10 cookies per sheet, but you can up it to 12 so you only need to bake two batches.
Cowboy Cookies
