Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

The other day, a fellow Cake4Kids volunteer, brought in some chocolate chip cookies to share at our monthly meeting.  The second I bit into that cookie, my search of 10+ years for the elusive best chocolate chip cookie ever was over.  When she emailed her recipe over, I wanted to slap myself on the forehead as it was from none other than my Baking Illustrated book!

A great tip she gave me was to definitely weigh my flour and sugars which I did.  A quick test had me off by 1-2 ounces each time I scooped and measured instead of weighed!  The recipe also called for semi-sweet but what I did was just mix my 60% dark chocolate chips with milk chocolate chips.  Yum!

Lemon Poppy Seed Bundt Cake

 

For Christmas, I got a bundt pan from my brother and within a week of receiving it, I made two delicious bundt cakes.  The first one I made, a sour cream pound cake, got devoured within minutes; so I didn't even get any pictures.  But this one here is a lemon poppy seed pound cake with a powdered sugar glaze.  Both recipes came from my BH&G Cook Book.  I substituted cake flour for the all purpose flour which definitely gave the cake the texture I was going for; moist and dense.  I loved that this recipe didn't involve separating eggs nor beating egg whites.