Ingredient sources:
- Guittard Baking chocolates: 4oz 70%, 4oz semisweet 60%
- Ghiradelli White chocolate bar: 4 oz
- Guittard Milk Chocolate chips: 2oz
- King Arthur All purpose flour
Self-hate level: 4
Recipe changes: cut granulated white sugar to 3/4 cup instead of 1 cup
The self-hate is at 4 (of 10) because I think they were too sweet and I’m always torn about making cookies. On the one hand, cookies are portable and easy to portion control. On the other, I’m not a fan of having to scoop, bake, cool, over and over again and it’s easy to binge cookies. I off-loaded extras on people at work.
They were good, but not what I like in a chocolate cookie: thin and crisp.
The recipe has very different ingredient ratios from other chocolate chip cookie recipes I’ve made:
Bravetart recipe | Misc. Others | |
Flour | 2 3/4 cups | 2 cups |
Eggs | 1 | 2 |
And, there was more baking soda than baking powder in this recipe, which is something I haven’t seen often.
I knew this was going to be a stiff dough just from the increased flour, but then just 1 egg! You’re told that this is going to be a stiff dough, but wow.

I didn’t mean this to be an ad for Williams-Sonoma on that spoon there. It’s a 2TBS spoon, and extremely convenient for measurements and 2TBS sized cookies. The other one is my 1TBS.
So part of my problem is that I didn’t mix the dough well enough. If you look at the dough, there are some really small, dry crumbs and some larger, slightly wetter bits. Not well mixed, which was totally my fault, and led to cookies that baked differently:

The smaller cookies are 1TBS, and the larger ones are 2TBS.
The cookies that were built up mostly from the dry, small crumbs were thicker and denser. The ones that had the larger, damper chunks came out flatter and crispier, which are my ideal chocolate chip cookie.
I think if I mixed it better, it would have gotten me more of the flatter, crispier cookies like in the cookbook’s pictures, but I’m not sure, even though the accompanying picture had thinner, crisper cookies. It was a really dry dough.
I’m not going to repeat this recipe. It was just too sweet and thick for me, and I’ve got another cookie recipe that I prefer. It was good to try, it’s just not for me.