Big Fat Cookies: Make Bakery Style Cookies at Home!

1. Welcome to the Big Fat Cookies class!: Hello and welcome to this class. My name is Peter. I am a Portuguese pastry chef, YouTuber, and cookbook author. But most of all, I am a lover of everything sweet, especially cookies. So if you like me, like cookies, but not any kind of cookies, we're talking big fat bakery style cookies. This is the class for you. Here's what you will learn. I will teach you a master recipe with all the tricks and tips for this kind of cookies. And we will use this dough to make a traditional chocolate chip and walnut cookie. But I will also teach you how to customize this though, so you can make the cookies that you like with all the flavors that you prefer, it will almost feel like you have your own private bakery at home. Are you excited? Let's get started. 2. Utensils & Ingredients : Before we get started with the recipe, I want to talk to you about all the utensils and ingredients we will need. This is a very simple recipe, very simple process. So I'm pretty certain that you'll probably already have this on-hand house for utensils. We will meet. I'm Evan trait, obviously an oven, parchment paper. If you have a cooling rack, that's great to measure out the ingredients, you will need either a scale or measuring cups. I'll provide both kinds of measures in the recipe for you. You will also need measuring spoons and to make the dough, you will need a mixer, either stand mixer or a hand mixer. If you have a stand mixer, you will use the paddle attachment. And if you like me, I'll be using a hand mixer today. If you have one of this, you will use these kinds of risks. These are the risks that are meant for heavy dose, which is the case of our though, has for the ingredients, I will leave them here. As you can see, they're very simple. You will need for the master recipe, butter, both white sugar and brown sugar, egg, flour, baking powder, and the pinch of salt, that's it. Now to convert this classic though into classic chocolate chip cookies, you will need chocolate and moments for convenience, I will leave the written recipe in the class resources. 3. Master Dough & Chocolat Chip Walnut dough: Okay, that's enough talking for now, let's start baking. Remembering that in this class, I will teach you how to make the master though that you will use not only to make the classic chocolate chip walnut cookies, but also other flavors that we will talk further ahead. Let's start by putting the butter into a bowl and the butter needs to be cooled and cutting two squares then at both white and brown sugar. And let's start mixing. At the beginning, you will notice it's a little bit difficult to incorporate the butter with the sugars because the butter is called. But we need the butter to be cold because this is one of the tricks that will make this law work. If you prefer stop the mixer and start using a spatula to make the dough come altogether. Instead of breaking it up, it will be much easier if you're using a stand mixer. But I wanted to use a hand mixer here. So you can see, you can do it both ways. Now that the dough is already more compact, you can return to the mixer and continue to mix until the dough comes together. It's creamy but very, very thick. I will show you the consistency at this point. It should look like this. This whole process should take between 35 minutes. Now, add the egg and keep on mixing for about one minute or until the egg is fully incorporated. When making this though, use your mixer in a medium to low speed with the egg fully incorporated. And let's now add the flour, baking powder and salt, and mix one more time until all the bell comes together, it should happen very fast in about one minute, all the flower will disappear. We will have our though ready and there we have it. I will show you the texture that our though we'll have at this point it's very, very thick, but if you touch it, it will feel soft, but it should not get glued to your fingers. You should be able to pinch a little bit of dough and very easily form a bowl with it like this. And our master though for big fat cookies, is officially ready. Okay, Let's make chocolate chip and walnut cookie that you can use. Chocolate chips are chunks that you buy or you can chop up a bar of chocolate into small chunks like this. And this is exactly what I did. Add the chocolate to the dough as well as the walnuts, and they should also be roughly chopped like this. We only need to mix all of these together to finish our nail. And for me the best way is to do it by hand because the thick there's a lot of chunks and our hands do a better job at mixing and incorporating and evenly distributing everything. It's actually very easy. You just have to kind of folded onto itself until all the dough looks the same. Our database is finally ready to make our cookies. And on our next class, I will show you how to shape them and to bake them. I will see you there. 4. Shaping the Cookies & Baking: We will start this class where we finished the last one with our chocolate chip and walnut cookie dough ready, we will divide the dollar by the amount of cookies you want to make. If you want to make big fat cookies, I would recommend doing five or six cookies with this amount of dough, you can do up to ten cookies, but of course they will be much smaller if you have a scale where your dough and then divide the full amount for the number of cookies you want to make. If you don't have a scale, you can just eyeball it. What you will do is get each piece of dough and roll it in your hands without pressing. We don't want to compacted though, we just want nicely round piece of dough. Place your dough balls in a tray with parchment paper. One of the most important tricks to get thick cookies is to bake our cookies when the dough is very, very cold. This will help maintaining the thickness, the tallness of the cookies, and overall the texture. So now that we have formed our cookie balls, we will take them to the fridge ideally for six hours before baking. If you are in a hurry, you can leave them for the minimum two hours, but please don't skip this step. Cover them with cling film. And after the fridge, they got a few hours have passed, and it's finally time to bake our cookies. At this point, our cookie dough is chilled and firm and cold. And all we have to do now is place our cookie dough balls into an oven tray with parchment, paper and leave a good amount of space between each ball because these cookies will grow and spread quite a bit in the oven. You will preheat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit or 180 Celsius. And when the oven breaches that temperature, place your tray there, and it will take from ten minutes to 25 minutes. This difference in baking time depends on the size of your cookie balls. Since I am making huge cookies, it will take more or less 25 minutes, but you need to keep an eye because each oven is different. There's two things you need to watch out while baking these cookies. We need fully baked cookies, but we still want go and almost creamy cookies on the inside. And we want a crispy outside, so they need to be golden brown around the edges and the top part cannot be shiny. If it's shiny, it means rod. So leave them in the oven for a few minutes more, but you probably don't want them to gain a lot of color on top because that could mean they are baking more than we want to. If you are in doubt about the baking time in your oven, or if you want to adjust the texture of these cookies to your liking, you can bake one cookie first and then adjust the baking time for the other cookies. These cookies will be good. Anytime they will be good worm, they will be good, cold, they will be good the next day. But for me, they are the absolute best when you eat them after taking them out of the oven for 15 minutes, what you will do is that you'll take them out of the oven and you'll have them rest on the tray for about five minutes. Then very carefully with a spatula, transfer it to a wire rack. If you have one and leave them there for about ten minutes more, then it's time to eat. If you don't eat them the same day, you bake them, you can store them in an airtight container. And look how soft and gooey this look the melted chocolate, the crunchy walnuts, and they are pretty crisp pure. This is obviously the best part of the recipe. These are so good. I will see you in the next class. 5. Tips for Other Cookie Flavours: Now that we have our classic chocolate chip and walnut cookies, it's time to teach you how to customize this though and transform it into the cookies of your dreams with your favorite flavors. Here are some important tips about this particular though, in order to achieve always big fat cookies, you use the chocolate that you prefer, any kind of chocolate, white, dark, semi sweet milk chocolate, you can use chunks or chips. I prefer to use chunks. I like to get a chocolate bar and correct myself because this way I get little pieces of chocolate with different sizes and they tend to distribute more evenly throughout the cookie dough. So I think they get more chocolatey this way, but it's up to you. And you will also need a nut or some kind of dried fruit to give volume to the dope if you only use chocolate, what will happen is that your cookies will tend to spread more. They want to be as fat as you want. If you like cookies this way, that's great. But if you want to have them very thick, you will need to use some ingredients for volume. And these ingredients can be all kinds of nuts, almonds, peanuts, a zone that's cashew nuts, or some kind of dried fruit like dried apricot, raisins, dates. You can use one kind, you can combine them, and also you can flavor the dope. You can use vanilla or any other ******. And you can also use citrus zest like lemon, orange, etc. I hope you'll have fun creating your own versions. 6. Milk Chocolate, Almond & Cinnamon Cookies: The first extra cookie we will make, it's gonna be milk chocolate, almonds, and cinnamon cookies. The spiciness of the cinnamon goes really well with the sweetness of the milk chocolate and the almonds are there for the crunch, I will be making a smaller amount of the recipe I have here, my master though, and the ingredients for these cookies. I have my milk chocolate chunks, chopped walnuts, and powdered cinnamon. All we have to do is mix all the ingredients as we did before. Shape our cookie dough into big balls. Remember not to combat the balls. The balls should be quite loose, refrigerated out and then bake them exactly as the ones before. 7. Dark Chocolate, Hazelnut & Orange Cookies: Next, cookies will be a zone that dark chocolate and orange cookies. We all know dark chocolate and orange are two flavors that always go well together. And hazelnuts compliment really well both citrus and chocolates. For these cookies, we're going to add a very strong orange flavor to do though. So we'll add orange zest. I also have here my chocolate chunks and my hazelnuts. You can either use hazelnuts that are pills. Are we the skin on? It's up to you. Now we will shape our dough balls like we did before, refrigerate them, and of course bake them and eat them. 8. White Chocolate, Pistachio & Cranberry Cookies: Okay, Our last flavor will be this Tasha, white chocolate and cranberry cookies. These are very festive cookies with three flavors that really go well together. Again, I have my master's already and for these cookies, I will add white chocolate chunks, pistachio, nuts, and dried cranberries. And it's the same process. Mix the dough, make bowls or of the dough, take them to the fridge and bake them. And here they are. I bet you could eat one right now. 9. Class Project: Now that you have learned how to make big fat cookies for the class project, I will challenge you to make a recipe from the class. You can either choose the classic chocolate chip walnut cookies or any of the three that I provided. Or you can create your own cookies. Just don't forget to take a picture and upload it to the class project so we can all see your creations and you can inspire others to bake big fat cookies. 10. Goodbye: This is the end of the class. I really hope you have enjoyed your time here learning how to make big fat cookies. Again, I m theta and you can find me on YouTube or Instagram at la Dolce Vita and now go banks and big fat cookies. This one is for you.