Let's start at the very beginning.... Chocolate chip cookies!

Our first attempt at baking was the chocolate chip cookie recipe in the cake boss book. I love to bake but in the past I’ve tended to stick to mixes and simple things like that. I’ve always tried to add my own twist when I use the mixes but I felt it was time for me to step up to the baking from scratch level. So in the middle of a snowstorm after shoveling, making a snowman, and watching a Next Great Baker marathon my sister and I decided it was time to step up to the challenge.

We started out alright following the recipe with minimal difficulties until it came time to add the brown sugar. We had brown sugar but quickly realized it was hard as a rock! Somehow the brown sugar had solidified into something resembling a brick. Since this was the middle of a blizzard my normal solution (forget about this package and run out and buy some new brown sugar) wouldn’t suffice. So I decided to shoulder on and used a knife and a spoon to scrape/ break up this package of brown sugar while my sister handled the rest of the ingredients. This worked out fairly well until it was time to mix. Unfortunately we are not in Carlo’s Bakery so we are not outfitted with a fancy Hobart mixer. We actually don’t even have a stand mixer, just a hand one. So while I struggled to mix the mixture with just the hand mixer my sister started shouting “push through the pain Buddy!!!” My parents who were watching this whole undertaking with amusement found her saying this absolutely hilarious.

The only time I deviated from the recipe was in the instance of the butter, by accident I used salted butter instead of unsalted as it specified in the recipe. When the cookies came out I swore I could taste the extra saltiness but everyone else said they were fine.

In the end the cookies turned out pretty good for our first try. If I made them again in the future I would not make the cookies as large. The recipe said to make the dough balls meatball sized and to make 24 of them but they turned out to be extra large cookies so I definitely would recommend making them smaller. At this point I hadn’t gotten professional about this blog endeavor yet so I don’t have any pictures of our finished product but next time there will be!