According to WinCalendar.com, May 15th is National Chocolate Chip Day! National Chocolate Chip Day celebrates and recognizes chocolate chips, an ingredient that takes part in many of our favourite desserts! The first Chocolate Chip recipe appeared in the Wakefield’s Tried and True cookbook in 1938. The popularity at the time was enormous. Afterwards, chocolate chips grew massively to become what it is today, an indispensable topping on most desserts.
Mentalfloss.com provides us with a brief history of the chocolate chip: Celebrating National Chocolate Chip Day – not a federal holiday, at least not yet – should be easy enough for all the classic dessert lovers and cookie aficionados out there. Just grab a bag of some chocolate morsels, whip them into some delectable cookie dough, and have at it. But have you ever wondered where exactly the chocolate chip came from? Who invented it? Who decided it was best for baking? Should we be calling it a “chip” or a “morsel”?
Chances are, you’ve made (or at least eaten) a Nestlé Toll House chocolate chip cookie at some point in your life. The baking bits purveyor has long stamped their “Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie” recipe on the back of their various morsel packages (and yes, all Nestlé packages refer to them as “morsels,” not “chips,”), so it’s no surprise that most people associate the famous cookie with Nestlé.
They’ve even got a whole story to go along with the kinda-sorta myth of the Toll House cookie. The traditional tale holds that Toll House Inn owner, Ruth Wakefield, invented the cookie when she ran out of baker’s chocolate, a necessary ingredient for her popular Butter Drop Do cookies (which she often paired with ice cream—these cookies were never meant to be the main event), and tried to substitute some chopped up semi-sweet chocolate instead. The chocolate was originally in the form of a Nestlé bar that was a gift from Andrew Nestlé himself, talk about an unlikely origin story! The semi-sweet chunks didn’t melt like baker’s chocolate, however, and though they kept their general shape (you know, chunky), they softened up for maximum tastiness.
The recipe was such a hit (it first popped up in Wakefield’s Tried and True cookbook in 1938, and it even appeared on Betty Crocker’s radio show, thanks to its massive popularity) that Wakefield eventually struck a deal with Nestlé: They would feature her recipe on the back of every bar of semi-sweet chocolate the company sold, and she’d get a lifetime supply of their chocolate.
Sounds great, right? Well, even if the story wasn’t exactly true, it did spawn a classic recipe that’s still the gold standard of chocolate chip cookie recipes, even though it’s been slightly tweaked over the years.
Ingredients:
- 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs
- 2 cups (12-ounce package) NESTLÉ® TOLL HOUSE® Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels
- 1 cup chopped nuts
Instructions:
PREHEAT oven to 375° F.
COMBINE flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.
BAKE for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.
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