Feasting on sweets!

Last night was a treat! Billy and I were invited to our friend Kyle's house for dinner.  Two of our really good friends, Garrett and Jessica, along with their sweet baby girl, Dylan, were there too!  Garrett and Kyle manned the grill and made some delicious chicken thighs.  Garrett wanted me to take pictures of him in his grill-mastery best, but I was too lazy to go get my camera. :)

For my contribution to dinner, I made cookies! Kyle loves a good cookie, and I haven't made any from scratch in a while, so I figured I'd give it a go.  These cookies are HUGE and soft.... I LOVE them!
You'll need:
2 cups of flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
one pinch of salt
1 1/2 sticks of butter softened
1 tablespoon Vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
Chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 325.  Cream the butter and sugars in a large bowl together.  Add the vanilla, egg and egg yolk. Mix. Put the flour, baking soda, and salt in a little at a time and mix on low.  Don't mix too much or the cookies will be tough.  Add as many or as few chocolate chips as you'd like.  (This recipe is also good with butterscotch or peanut butter chips.)  Use parchment paper on your cookie sheets if you have it-- it just helps with clean up and removing the cookies from the pan.  I use a 1/4 measurer to divide out my cookies.  If you use the 1/4 cup measure this recipe should make about 16 cookies.  I also have to use 3 cookie sheets when I use the 1/4 measure.  These really get BIG!  Cook for about 15 minutes, give or take a minute or two.  Rotate the racks halfway through if you are using 3 cookie sheets or the ones on the bottom rack will get too brown.

I have to admit that I didn't make this recipe....The only things I changed are having the butter just softened and not melted and the amount of chocolate chips. The original recipe wants WAY too many (and I love chocolate!).  You can melt the butter if you don't have time for it to soften on the counter ( I did yesterday), but the times that I have made this when the butter was just melted, the cookies have been a little flat.  I know this is supposed to be my ideas for cooking, but my theory is if it aint broke, don't fix it! These cookies are awesome!! Plus, it's hard to create baking recipes!  Cooking can just be thrown together, baking has to be too precise to just throw stuff in!

I did have pictures of these right after I pulled them out of the oven, but I think my phone ate them because I can't find them anywhere.... weird!!!!!