I love baking.
I’m not particularly good at it, given my absentminded nature and the precision baking requires, but chocolate chip cookies are easy enough that they’re almost impossible to screw up, and as such have kinda become my calling card. I take great pride in my chocolate chip cookies. It helps that they’re my favorite dessert flavor. So, I thought, why not pit several different recipes against each other and see which one is best? Welcome to PostMordial Soup’s first food challenge: The Chocolate Chip Cookie Gauntlet.
THE CONTENDERS
The recipes selected for this competition are as follows:
- Pudding cookies: the recipe my mother made for us when we were kids, and subsequently the one I made for years and years before Pinterest showed me that there were other recipes in the world. I used to have it memorized, and these are the cookies my college friends know best. The It Factor: one large box of vanilla pudding mix (though people trying this recipe are more than encouraged to try different pudding flavors; they’re lovely with chocolate, for example).
- Mormon cookies: thus called because this was the recipe I was trying out when I was becoming friends with my non-college best friends, and that’s what they called them (something something “surely Mormon magicks have gone into these to make them soft and melty days later”, something something sacrificial goat blood joke). The It Factor: this recipe is doubled from the original so I can use a whole bag of chocolate chips, so it has the most flour and cornstarch of all the others.
- Magnolia Table cookies: my mother has a current interest in Joanna Gaines’ career and her cookbook is hanging around the house, and I was curious what her cookies would be like. The It Factor: the least amount of butter and only brown sugar, no white sugar.
- Levain Bakery cookies: these looked particularly interesting as a recipe, and I wanted a fourth recipe to balance out the others. The It Factor: cold butter, cake flour (which I didn’t use due to budgeting this time around), walnuts, and no vanilla.
I knew this gauntlet was going to introduce a ton of sweets into my already sweets-imperiled life, so I deliberately waited for a holiday to inflict them upon my extended family and hopefully lessen the amount of cookies in the house. Independence Day rolled around and I was excited and ready to go.
THE DOUGH
The best part of any cookie recipe, besides eating them fresh from the oven, is eating the raw dough. It is definitely not recommended due to possible salmonella from raw eggs and E. coli from raw flour, but some things just have to be risked.
The Pudding cookies dough turned out beautiful, as it always does, classically yellow and packed with vanilla flavor. The unfortunate wrench thrown into this recipe was that in my desire to cut costs, I used leftover chocolate chips cobbled from several bags from the pantry, not realizing how long they’d been in there; the answer is MUCH TOO LONG.
The Mormon cookies dough I made the night before; a happy accident in making them for my Relief Society class revealed that refrigerating the dough did indeed make it better upon baking, so I went ahead and did it up. The dough comes out paler than the rest, and due to the amount of dry ingredients, the dough is much less sticky than the other recipes.
The Magnolia Table dough turned out a gorgeous darker brown thanks to the brown sugar, and definitely had the strongest caramel flavor. It was also grainier than the other doughs, likely due to brown sugar’s texture, and fluffier thanks to the several minutes Jo Gaines recommends you beat the butter for.
The Levain Bakery cookies were an interesting challenge. I personally don’t usually go for walnuts in my baking, but they added an extra crunch to the dough (as can be expected), and the texture of the dough was almost crystalline with sugar at points. To my surprise, it turned out crumblier than the Mormon cookies, but I blame undermixing (in my defense, the recipe says not to overdo it, so naturally I probably underdid it).
THE BAKING
The great thing about baking four different recipes is that they bake at different temperatures and times, but luckily the Mormon cookies and the Magnolia Table cookies were the same, so putting half a batch of one and half a batch of the other in was no trouble. It was a bit awkward baking the Pudding cookies and Levain Bakery cookies directly afterward, but I wanted them all to be relatively warm and fresh at the time of tasting to really get an idea of their flavor profiles and textures, so the oven and I suffered through.
I promise they’re two different recipes. 
The real MVP: nonstick foil 
Uh-oh.
As with most cookies, letting them set on the baking sheet for a few minutes is recommended so they don’t fall apart in the transfer from the sheet to the cooling rack. The Pudding and Mormon cookies came up without a hitch. The Magnolia Table cookies stuck a bit to the sheet and took a little work to get up; unfortunately, trying to circumvent that by scooping them up immediately just makes the cookies fall apart, so just be aware that they will cling to your baking sheet a bit. The Levain Bakery cookies, the recipe says, should sit for ten to fifteen minutes on the sheet, but in my opinion the usual one to three minutes on the sheet is just fine.
The Pudding cookies, when baked, are the kind of picturesque melty and soft that chocolate chip cookies in commercials wish they were, settling into a photogenic topography as they cool. Unfortunately for this batch, the old chocolate taste from the chocolate chips really overwhelmed the vanilla flavor from the dough; as my brother put it, “They taste like old Halloween candy.” Deeply unfair, given how perfectly they turned out.
The Mormon cookies remain the palest of the bunch, looking almost underbaked when they’re taken out, but the gorgeous golden-brown of the bottoms gives them away. They stay round and pillowy as they cool, and the centers are gooey and soft. The chocolate chips stay melty for long after they’ve been taken from the oven.
The lighting really doesn’t capture the color differences. 
Delicious and soft.
The Magnolia Table cookies come out looking almost caramelized, and they immediately begin to crisp up as they cool. Of all the cookies, they have a texture and taste almost like soft caramel, sticky and chewy. They keep their lovely darker brown color, and the graininess of the dough seems to melt into a much better texture upon baking.
The Levain Bakery cookies…took some work. They bake at the highest temperature, and for a while I was putting one batch in to bake while the other batch sat on its sheet for ten minutes. Ten minutes is much too long for these cookies to bake, and they burn easily; eight to nine minutes is my recommendation. The recipe calls for them to be large cookies. When I did that, they baked like bricks, and were almost completely raw in the middle (or at least much too gooey). With some experimenting, I found that just dropping them in regular portions produces solid cookies that are dense, but not the disaster the first batch turned out to be. The walnuts really add something to the flavor, as well; maybe I like them more in my old age.
Not sure about this… 
Yikes!! 
Better the second time
DAYS LATER
In my opinion, the mark of a good chocolate chip cookie recipe is how they hold up after a few days. The thing about baked goods is that they’re meant to be consumed pretty immediately, so not a lot of stuff keeps for all that long, but cookies are one of those things that are meant to last a little longer. After three days, these are the results of my labors (roughly six hours of them).
The Pudding cookies’ texture, at least, is still perfect: soft, chewy, lovely color and texture. The old chocolate chips’ flavor has completely overtaken the goodness of the dough, though, and eating them just makes me sad. Next time, I’m just paying out the extra three dollars for a fresh bag of chocolate chips, because few things are sadder than a perfect recipe ruined by a single avoidable mistake (the story of my life).
The Mormon cookies hold up extremely well with age, and this batch is no different. The chocolate chips are still soft and a little melted, the cookie itself is tender and flavorful. Still a winner, in my book.
The Magnolia Table cookies, I think, are the most changed; they went from having a deeper flavor to tasting just like straight sugar, and the cookies are hard as opposed to crispy. Not bad, just a little disappointing.
The Levain Bakery cookies are a recipe I will be trying again. The walnuts are an excellent touch, but they’re the only flavor left in the dough at this point (I blame the lack of vanilla extract. And the overbaking of several of the batches). The cookies are still solid—not hard, just solid. They almost taste like granola (not bad, necessarily, just not the flavor profile I’m hoping for in a chocolate chip cookie).
THE CONCLUSION
In all, the Mormon cookies hold up best as cookies (they would be hard-pressed to keep up with the Pudding cookies if I hadn’t screwed up the chocolate chip bit, though). They’re still soft, still flavorful, still an enjoyable eating experience days later. I think the Magnolia Table cookies disappoint me the most (again, leaving off the Pudding cookies’ unfortunate chocolate chip situation), and I want to try the Levain Bakery cookies again to give them a fair shake, now that I know a little better what I’m doing with the recipe.
The opinions I gathered from family members are that the Levain Bakery and Mormon cookies are the favorites of most, though all four were praised and one of my aunts said I was the cookie lady now. The ultimate winner of the Gauntlet this time around are the Mormon cookies, then!
In future Gauntlets, maybe I’ll spread the baking out some so I don’t have an entire counter covered in diabetic temptation, but until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed this experience!
