Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Cookies – Can I get a Hellz Yeah?

Back in the spring, a friend of mine told me about the pleasures of chocolate chip cheesecake cookies. I was busy with some other recipes at the time, but I made a mental note and pinned a recipe from the boards. When I went back to make them, the site had been moved, and it took a little maneuvering to get to the link I have posted there. But I wanted to stick with that recipe because when I went looking for other ones, I still thought this cookie looked the most delicious, at least based on the all of the pictures I found. The photo I liked best on Pinterest looked like this:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon baking soda
• 10 tablespoons butter (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 3 ounces cream cheese
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 12 ounces chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375.

Combine dry ingredients (flour through soda) in a bowl and set aside. In mixer, blend butter, sugar, egg, cream cheese, and vanilla. Slowly add the dry ingredients, mixing with each addition, until all are incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Grease a cookie sheet. Drop dough by the spoonful onto sheet, at least 1 inch apart.

Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown around edges.

Note: Dough can be refrigerated until firm, then rolled into a log and frozen (in air-tight freezer bag) for up to 1 month. When ready to bake, let thaw 30 minutes to 1 hour (until soft enough to slice); slice in 3/4″ wide disks and bake.

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I began by putting the dry ingredients into a bowl.

Then I creamed the butter and sugar with the mixer.

And then the eggs and vanilla were added. The original pin had part of the recipe as its comment, which claimed that you had to add the cream cheese and dry ingredients alternately, so I did that, but later when I found the actual recipe on the freakishly productive site, that process was not a part of it.

After the batter was smooth, I added the chocolate chips,

and then dropped bits of the dough onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Since I didn’t have the full recipe to begin with, I baked by trial-and-error. The first batch baked for eight minutes,

but even though they were cooked, the bottom was a little soft.

So then I baked them for ten minutes, and that turned out to be the magic number of minutes, at least for my oven.

When the cookies first came out, I thought, meh. They weren’t so great, like there was almost something missing. But then, the cookies got cooler, and overnight they really bloomed. They do taste just like chocolate chip cheesecake, rich and chewy, with a little tang on your tongue. But I only got to eat a couple of them because the kids gobbled up the rest!