She Said Hers Were Better. Fine. Let’s Make Them.

If you’ve been following along with my chocolate chip cookie challenge, you know one of the recipes made the list because its creator very confidently declared that her chocolate chip cookies were the best.

Naturally, people had opinions about that.

One of those people was Mystic in the Kitchen.

She showed up in the comments insisting that her chocolate chip cookies were better. There was a little back and forth. She stood by her cookies. And eventually she decided she needed to make a TikTok about them.

At this point, I was already looking through the comments trying to decide whether another recipe might earn its way into my challenge.

She argued her case enough to get my attention.

Her recipe was pinned right at the top of her TikTok page.

And that was pretty much all it took.

No complicated selection process. No careful analysis of ingredients. No spreadsheet comparing recipes.

She said hers were better.

I found the recipe.

Fine. You’re in.

You can watch Mystic in the Kitchen’s original TikTok here.

Wait…There’s Water in These Cookies?

Then I actually read the recipe.

Two cups flour. Baking soda. Salt. Butter. Sugar. An egg. Vanilla. Chocolate.

Pretty standard stuff.

And then:

Two tablespoons of water.

Water?

In my chocolate chip cookies?

For whatever reason, that completely floored me.

Her recipe uses only one egg along with two tablespoons of water. It also has a sugar ratio I wasn’t used to seeing: 1½ cups white sugar to only ¼ cup brown sugar.

So now I was really curious about what these things were going to do.

The chocolate was interesting, too. Instead of chocolate chips, she uses a bag of snack-size Hershey’s bars and roughly chops them into everything from little slivers to big chunks. She actually says some of the pieces can be large enough that you can still read Hershey’s on them.

I did like that idea.

Then Things Got Even More Interesting

This wasn’t exactly a mix-it-up, scoop-it-out and bake-it cookie either.

The recipe has you shape all of the dough into a loaf, put it in a freezer bag and freeze it for at least an hour. When you’re ready to bake, you cut that loaf into 16 pieces and roll those pieces into balls.

There was one slight problem.

There was absolutely no room in my freezer.

None.

And I wasn’t reorganizing my entire freezer for a chocolate chip cookie.

Luckily, the highest part of my refrigerator has a tendency to freeze things anyway, so that’s where the dough went.

Close enough.

I also didn’t cut the dough into 16 pieces because once again we had entered GIANT COOKIE TERRITORY.

Why does everyone want me to make enormous cookies?

I was making several different recipes for people to try, so I needed something resembling a normal chocolate chip cookie rather than something that could double as lunch.

I made mine with roughly tablespoon-size balls of dough instead.

And Then I’m Supposed to Beat Them Into Submission

This recipe has one technique I had definitely never used before.

You bake the cookies for about ten minutes, until the centers puff.

Then you take the pans out of the oven and drop them onto a dish towel on the counter to make those beautiful puffed centers collapse.

Back into the oven they go.

They puff again.

You pull them out.

Bang.

Back into the oven.

And apparently you continue this process until they’re done.

I read those instructions and thought:

Absolutely not.

First of all, who has time for this?

Second—and perhaps more importantly—I don’t want a flat cookie.

If my chocolate chip cookie comes out of the oven beautifully puffed in the middle, the very last thing I’m inclined to do is slam the pan onto the counter and deliberately knock the life out of it.

So I didn’t.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to.

I May Have Accidentally Made Dessert Taco Shells

The cookies weren’t terribly flat when they first came out of the oven.

And then they sat.

And spread.

And flattened.

And flattened some more.

These cookies were THIN.

Not oh, this is a slightly thinner chocolate chip cookie than I normally make thin.

We’re approaching you can almost see through this thing thin.

They also spread enough that some of them ran into each other on the baking sheet. I hadn’t overcrowded the pan, either. I had actually reduced the number of cookies I put on each tray because I knew they were supposed to spread.

Apparently I did not reduce it enough.

At one point I looked at them and realized these things probably would have made fantastic dessert taco shells.

Seriously.

Pull one out while it’s still warm, drape it over something, let it cool…

Fill it with ice cream?

Chocolate?

Whipped cream?

Strawberries?

Okay, maybe we’re onto something here.

It just wasn’t exactly what I wanted from a chocolate chip cookie.

Did I Do Something Wrong?

Obviously, when a cookie comes out that dramatically different from what you expect, you start questioning yourself.

And there are a couple of things I changed.

I didn’t freeze the dough exactly as instructed because my freezer was full. I used the coldest part of my refrigerator instead.

I also made the cookies smaller than the recipe called for. Her recipe divides the dough into just 16 cookies, while I made mine with approximately tablespoon-size portions. Because mine were smaller, I may have shortened the baking time somewhat, too.

And I refused to bang the pans on the counter.

Although considering how flat mine became without banging them repeatedly, I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had.

At some point we would have left the realm of cookies entirely.

Maybe communion wafers?

These Were Definitely Different

Another thing that stood out was the color.

These cookies were blonde.

Extremely blonde.

Even after baking, I kept looking at them thinking they needed more color. But the recipe specifically warns not to overbake them. The instructions say that if you look at them and think they need another 30 seconds, they’re already done.

So I resisted the urge to keep baking just because they weren’t the color I expected a finished chocolate chip cookie to be.

Between the pale color, the extreme spread, the chopped Hershey bars, the water in the dough and the pan-banging technique I completely refused to participate in, these were easily one of the more unusual chocolate chip cookie recipes I made during this challenge.

But Here’s the Thing About Chocolate Chip Cookies…

I didn’t sit down and eat an entire one.

I did taste a piece, and no, they weren’t terrible.

They just weren’t the style of chocolate chip cookie I normally gravitate toward.

But that’s also exactly why I wanted several very different recipes in this challenge.

I like a thick cookie.

Someone else wants one thin.

I want some height in the middle.

Someone else wants that thin, buttery cookie that spreads halfway across the baking sheet.

And apparently somebody out there wants to repeatedly bang a perfectly good cookie pan on the counter.

There really isn’t one universally perfect chocolate chip cookie.

In fact, one of our friends’ sons loved these and happily took the leftovers.

So clearly Mystic in the Kitchen knows exactly what at least one chocolate-chip-cookie eater wants.

And honestly?

That’s kind of the whole point of this ridiculous challenge.

I wasn’t trying to make eight versions of the same cookie. I wanted to see what happened when you put completely different ideas of the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie in front of a bunch of people.

These?

These were definitely different.

And if you’re a thin-cookie person, you may need to try them.

Just make sure you have plenty of room on your baking sheet.

Seriously.