Choco Chip Cookies Turn Science Experiment

My all time favorite cookie has to be the good ole semi sweet chocolate chip cookie. I love the bittersweet taste of semi-sweet VS milk chocolate. Luckily I already worked out this morning because I have devoured about a dozen of them.

What I love about this recipe is it yields chewy and crispy cookies at the same time. I don't know if that even makes any sense but just go with it. The best part about this recipe is I have had it forever! It is literally from William-Sonoma's easy kid friendly recipe book. This book happened to be my first cookie book that I got for Christmas when I think I was about 12 and also has one of my fave home made chocolate mousse recipe that I used to make all the time.

After making them, what I didn't realize, is I stumbled upon a little baking science experiment... Notice the cookies in the above picture and the below picture. What do you see? Do they look different?

The answer is YES they should look a little different. In the first picture the cookies are flatter and more spread out but the ones directly above are crispier around the edges and a little bit fluffier, if you will. 

What I found to be interesting is the 2 variables that made this happened. I used the EXACT same recipe but yielded 2 different cookie textures. Any guesses on what caused it?... the PAN. I used 2 different kind of baking sheets simply because I was being lazy and didn't want to whip on the big half sheet pans. 

The picture above is really ugly - sorry blogger is compressing it weird - but you can see the difference in the "loft" of the cookies now. 

The ones on the left I cooked on a "dark" cookie sheet and they made the cookies a little bit more crisp and not spread out as much. Typical dark cookie sheets will hold in more heat. The cookies on the right I used a "light" colored cookie sheet which doesn't hold in as much heat which caused them to spread out more and be more chewy. 

The other variable was I cooked the ones on the left on the bottom which is closer to the heat source which can also have an effect on your cookies. 

So which is the best method to making choco. chip cookies? Well it depends on your taste. Personally, I like the ones on the right better, the chewy ones. but the other ones aren't that bad either. 

Lesson to be learned here: YES THE PAN MAKES A DIFFERENCE. [Hint: When you are making sugar cookies use a LIGHT colored pan.]