Baking Trivia

In my joblessness (yes, I'm still unemployed), I've been baking a lot. Last week I made cake, a whole cake, one with ingredients that took four hours to make myself (dulce de leche, in case you were wondering), merely because I was craving a piece. I have time to do these things. I can barely afford ingredients anymore, but I have all the free time in the world. So I experiment a lot too. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Turns out, trying to make healthy cookies only sort of works. I say sort of because the chocolate chip cookies that I made the other day taste awesome, just like chocolate chip cookies, but they have the texture of cake. Little chocolate chip cakes. They're still quite good, they're just not very cookie-like. This is apparently what happens when you use 2 parts yogurt and 1 part butter instead of all butter. It works really well for actual cake, and for dessert-like breads (like banana), but used in a cookie it just transforms said cookie into a wee cake. I guess you learn something new every day. So, if you feel like making your own chocolate chip mini-cakes, a recipe for you:

2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup plain yogurt (I used non-fat)
1/3 cup softened butter (use butter, not margarine)
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 package (12 oz) chocolate chips

- Preheat oven to 375
- Beat yogurt, butter, sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla until creamy (I used a whisk first to make the yogurt and butter smooth)
- Add eggs and beat well
- Gradually add flour, baking soda, and salt
- Stir in chips
- Drop teaspoons of batter onto a greased cookie sheet (normally you don't have to prepare the cookie sheet at all, but the absence of most of the butter makes the cookies stick a little bit)
- Bake 8-ish minutes until lightly browned