Since I was out of the office Thursday and Friday of last week to attend a quilt retreat in Lancaster, PA, I made cookies for our fourth quarterfinal game on Tuesday night. Finally we had reached our final untasted recipe, the number 1 seed, Kristy's Award Winning Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies (p. 121).
Kristy's recipe includes optional chopped walnuts, which gave me pause. What are the tournament rules regarding optional ingredients? I had just had a conversation with some coworkers which revealed that nuts are apparently a polarizing ingredient to include in cookies! If I included the nuts, was I doing a disservice to Kristy? But I like nuts in my cookies. So, throwing caution to the wind, I included them.
At this juncture I'd like to have a quick sidebar about "chopped" nuts. I have noticed that the supermarket sells Diamond brand chopped nuts... they sell local farm brands of chopped nuts. And I have come to believe that "chopped" is the nut industry's term for "nuts that aren't whole". This includes mostly nuts that are 95% whole and are, in my opinion, in need of further processing to make them "chopped".
Regardless, instead of pulling out my food processor to chop the walnuts, I decided to "save time" by breaking them into small pieces with my hands. This time-saving method, of course, ended up taking gobs of time, and I finally got to baking these cookies after 9 pm. Another ingredient in Kristy's Award Winning Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies was instant pudding mix (I suspect this is a "secret ingredient" of Kristy's). My husband had kindly bought two packages for me at the store... which were, alas, the wrong size. I determined through measurement that I needed to include exactly 1 and 1/3 boxes of pudding mix. I can say with almost absolute certainty that 1/3 box of the larger size of pudding mix is about 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon of pudding mix, and that is what I added to the mix.
Nonetheless, they baked well, and, made the ton of cookies Kristy indicates (6 dozen!). Then I moved on to baking Wanda's Chocolate Chip Cookies (number 8 seed), which previously beat out Cranberry Oat Chip Cookies in a preliminary matchup. Wanda's cookies baked exceedingly well, which may indicate that I really should have baked all of the recipes in a trial run prior to embarking on the tournament. Of course that would have cost a lot of money and time, and I would have had to consume all of them myself! This time the Chocolate Chip Cookies baked perfectly. One taster said they were the best cookies she had ever had and that she was going to "make love to them". Others were wowed by the softness and chocolate-chip-rich Award Winning Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies. As my husband put it, "This is going to be the closest one yet".
When the final votes were tallied, Wanda's Chocolate Chip Cookies lost by only one vote to Kristy's Award Winning Chocolate Chip Cookies, with a score of 10 to 11. Now we have our final four:
(1) Award Winning Chocolate Chip Cookies
(4) Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
(2) Salted Chocolate Chip Cookies
(3) Turtle Fudge Chocolate Chip Cookies
No, I don't have the numbers out of order - those are the seeds. Apparently my original seeding was impeccable: we have only seen one upset (Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies over Chocolate Chip Cookies in Preliminary Match 1, which, if you recall, I suggested would probably happen prior to the start of the tournament). Do I just know my cookies, or, as my husband accuses, am I secretly trying harder when I bake the cookie I expect to win? I suspect I am just a cookie genius!
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