| | Published August 1st, 2012
| Crazy for Cookies!
| | By Susie Iventosch | | |
The way I see it, you can never have too many cookie recipes in your goodie arsenal!
This recipe was created by Debby Dyar, partner of Moon Dance Baking Company, when her children were young. Back then, she loved to cook for swim team and other kid activities, but now enjoys cooking for a much larger audience such as the many customers of Diablo Foods, Whole Foods and Lunardi's, where her cookies are locally featured.
While she was in Florence, Italy nearly 20 years ago, she visited The American Bakery, a shop where Italian cookies were adapted to suit American tastes.
"This gave me the idea to try making my own biscotti adapted to American tastes," Dyar said.
This passion of hers resulted in a baking business, Splendido Biscotti, which she started and operated from 1993 to 2003.
Meanwhile, her current business partner and Lafayette resident, Phil Chernin, worked for La Tempesta, the first American company to put chocolate on biscotti.
"This was sacrilege to Italians," Chernin pointed out.
Ultimately, Dyar sold Splendido and in 2005 she teamed up with Chernin to form Moon Dance Baking Company. Together, they market a host of different cookies from biscotti and butter, sugar and chocolate chip cookies to cookie brittle (oh my, is this ever good ... kind of like a very thin shortbread-buttery and crispy and amazing!), and even red and black licorice!
Chernin, who is also Chairman of Lafayette's Open Space Committee and was on the new library fundraising committee, says Dyar is brilliant at developing new cookie flavors, and I have to agree as Chocolate-dipped Butter Mint, Hazelnut Chocolate Chip and Meyer Lemon come to mind.
To Dyar, the key is loading up on the chocolate chips. "We pride ourselves on the amount of chocolate chips we use," she noted.
Which is why you'll find that this recipe calls for more than twice the amount of chocolate chips a normal recipe uses. (I used combination of milk, bittersweet and semi-sweet chips.)
This is a double-double recipe and will make approximately 90 or so normal-sized cookies. I cut it in half and made almost 4 dozen cookies.
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Chocolate Chip Cookies
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| By Susie Iventosch |
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| Moon Dance Baking Co. Chocolate Chip Cookies Photo Susie Iventosch
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INGREDIENTS
2 cups granulated sugar
2 cups brown sugar
1 pound melted butter
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp vanilla
4 eggs (room temp.)
4 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
4 12 oz. packs of semi sweet chocolate chips + 1 cup of chips.
DIRECTIONS
Cream butter and sugars. Add vanilla and eggs. Sift together dry ingredients and add to butter mixture. Add chocolate chips and mix thoroughly. Place by level ice cream scoops full on greased cookie sheet. Bake 12-14 minutes at 325 degrees. Alternately, for a "taller cookie" you can form three balls (each approximately a half of heaping tablespoon size) of dough in your hands and stack on top of each other. Press the dough down about halfway. Bake at 325 for 14-16 minutes.
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Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA