Quarterfinals Game #3: Salted Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookies vs. Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies

Last weekend we went to stay at my sister's house for the weekend to squelch the complaints from both my son and my sister that they hadn't seen each other in "forever".  Since the third quarterfinal game in the March Cookie Madness bracket was planned for the following Monday, Sunday morning found me at my sister's house baking up a batch of the number 2 seed, Todd's Salted Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookies (p. 130). 

First I had to find English Toffee Bits, which a quick Google search revealed can be purchased under the Heath brand in the baking section of stores.  On Saturday, I stopped by the local Food Lion where I ran into my sister.  The store had no English Toffee Bits, but I did pick up the required sea salt and helped my sister pick out some lunch for all of us (pizza).  Blithely ignoring the fact that I still did not have all of the ingredients, I went about the business of having a good time and left it until Sunday morning to find the English Toffee Bits, despite the fact that we planned to leave right after lunch.  Luckily they were easily located at the SuperFresh (recommended by my sister as a store that has "all that weird stuff") and I got started on the cookies around 10am.  Excitingly enough, the recipe required a 45 minute chilling time.  I mixed them up quickly, using the tried and true pot-inside-another-pot-with-water method of getting around not having the double boiler mentioned in the recipe.  The toffee bits melted into the cookie mix, which indicated to me that I probably didn't allow the chocolate mixture to cool sufficiently.  Nonetheless, I continued, dropping spoonfuls (or rather forming balls out of the play-doh-like dough) onto wax paper onto cookie sheets.  Now, I have never used wax paper in the oven before, but Todd assured me it would be fine in lieu of parchment paper.  The result was a surprising amount of steam which issued forth from my sister's oven!  The cookies took awhile to reach the "cracked top" stage, whereupon I removed them from the oven and allowed them to cool (against my better judgment, but following Todd's instructions) on the sheets.  The result was a slightly burned, hard-as-a-rock cookie.  Oh, and they stuck to the wax paper and pans.  I thought they were awful but my nephew loved them and ate quite a few before I shooed him away.  I pried them up once cool and loaded them all in a plastic ziploc bag to take home, very unhappy with the results. 

After arriving home, I whipped up my second-ever batch of the number 10 seed, Pragati's Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies (p. 133).  The cookies came together similarly to the first time with two exceptions:

1. While measuring out the natural peanut butter, I noticed halfway through that I had not mixed the container well so there was more chunky material at the bottom of the jar versus what I had in my measuring cup, so I tried to add a lump of the chunky material into my cup at that juncture.
2. I baked them a bit larger than the previous time in an attempt to make them a size similar to the Toffee Cookies. 

I mention these two differences because everyone who tasted these cookies said they showed batch reproducibility issues - there was a raging debate about whether these were cookies that had been presented before!  I cleared that up and was surprised to find a lot of support for the Salted Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookies.  People were waxing poetic about it, while I downed Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies one after another.  Apparently my tastes now run completely contrary to almost everyone else's.  Perhaps I had simply forgotten that my coworkers overwhelmingly prefer the cookie with the most chocolate to anything else, even if those chocolate cookies are burnt!

Here is a picture of the cookies (Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies are on the left and Salted Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookies are on the right):

The end result was 8 votes for Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies and 12 votes for Salted Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookies.  I was rather distraught over messing up Pragati's cookies, but I suppose I equally messed up Todd's cookies, so I guess the playing field was even.  I'll just have to try to do better with the Salted Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookies next time.  Congratulations, Todd!