How to make Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies (2024)

This post will teach you how to make perfect chocolate chip cookies from scratch. It is a detailed guide, full of tips and tricks to help you make amazing homemade chocolate chip cookies. This easy chocolate chip cookie recipe makes a great base, so you can customise your chocolate chip cookies as you like!

I am not claiming that these are 'the best chocolate chip cookies' ever, but to me, this easy chocolate chip cookie recipe has everything I look for in a chocolate chip cookie. As a baking blogger, I have made my fair share of homemade chocolate chip cookies, and this cookie recipe is my back pocket, everyday simple chocolate chip cookie recipe. It is the one I go back to time and time again, for so many reasons:

• The dough comes together super quickly with no additional steps.
• Three kinds of sugar gives you amazing texture and chew.
• Huge chocolate puddles (which are optional), are my favorite.
• Crispy outsides, and a chewy chocolate chip cookie middle
• The dough freezes amazingly, so it is great to keep on hand.

To me, these are the perfect chocolate chip cookies. I have also stuffed this post full of tips and tricks for making the best chocolate chip cookies - a lot of these tips can be applied to any chocolate chip cookie recipe, I just wanted a place for them all to live!

If you love this simple chocolate chip cookie recipe, make sure to check out my brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe! For a quick and easy cookie situation with no scooping and rolling needed, my chocolate chip cookie bars are the perfect thing.

How to make the best chocolate chip cookies

There are a few steps to make sure these perfect chocolate chip cookies work out as well as possible:

Make sure your butter and sugar are properly creamed.

This chocolate chip cookie recipe yields a slightly thicker cookie, and part of that comes from the beating of the butter and sugars. This aerates the mixture, providing both lift in the recipe and texture.

It is important to ensure that the mixture is light and fluffy before adding in the eggs. Using melted butter in a recipe such as in my and my mini egg cookie recipe, or brown butter like I use in my small batch chocolate chip cookie recipe gives a slightly denser, chewier cookie.

Measure your ingredients properly.

I think we all know now how important baking with a scale is to ensure accuracy - this applies here too.

Portion with a scoop.

Having nice evenly sized cookies means that they are going to bake evenly. I like to use a spring loaded cookie scoop to scoop out my cookie dough, but if you do not have one, you can weigh the balls of dough - each one should weigh about 55g.

Chill the cookie dough.

This is an important step for this recipe - chilling the cookie dough allows the flavours in the cookie batter to develop, the flour to hydrate slightly, and the butter to chill down. Give the cookie dough at least an hour in the fridge, or up to overnight.

How to make gooey chocolate chip cookies - bake until just set.

The level of doneness on a chocolate chip cookie is obviously personal preference. I prefer mine only just baked. Removing the cookies from the oven when they are just done gives you a nice gooey inside and a slightly crispy edge - remember they will set up on the pan a little too.

How to make chewy chocolate chip cookies

The role of sugar in cookies is important - both the amount in terms of the ratio of sugar to other ingredients, and the ratio of brown to white sugar.

When I am testing, I will play around with the quantities of white and brown sugar in a recipe - if i want the cookie to be thicker, a little chewier, and spread less, I will use more brown sugar, whereas if I want slightly crispier edges and more spread, I will increase the ratio of brown to white sugar.

I often get asked if it is possible to reduce the quantity of sugar in a cookie without compromising the texture - the short answer to this is no. Sugar plays an important role in the structure of the cookie, as it contributes to the moisture level while also interacting with the fat to provide lift within the cookie.

If you want to make a cookie appear less sweet, you can make sure that the dough is properly salted, and use darker chocolate in the cookie to offset the sweetness.

This recipe has brown, white, and raw / turbinado sugar in it. The brown and white sugar provide texture, while the turbinado gives a little crunch that I love so much.

Adding an extra yolk to chocolate chip cookies can also help provide chew - I do this in my egg yolk chocolate chip cookie recipe.

What is the best chocolate to use in chocolate chip cookies?

I almost always use chopped chocolate in my chocolate chip cookies. There are a few reasons for this:

• Sizing - Cutting up chocolate into chunks gives you a great range of size in your chocolate. This means you get a good distribution throughout
• Melty Pockets of chocolate - Chocolate chips often have a stabiliser in them which means they don't melt. This makes them great for things like muffins, but I much prefer using chopped chocolate for cookies because the chocolate melts, and you get pockets of chocolate throughout.
• Quality - if you use chopped chocolate, you can use whatever quality you like. It's also a great way to mix up the types of chocolate you use too - I like doing a mix of dark and then sometimes a fun flavour
• Chocolate Dust - This is a name I made up, but the dust is what's left from chopping chocolate. It all goes into the bowl and you get tiny chocolate specks all throughout the cookies.
• Melty Chocolate Puddles - Chopped chocolate means you can press extra chocolate onto the top of the cookies to get big chocolate puddles!
• If you want to use chocolate chips instead of chopped chocolate, by all means go ahead?

How to get big puddles on chocolate chip cookies

I like to use a little trick to get those big puddles on the tops of my chocolate chip cookies. Just before the dough goes in the oven, I take each ball of dough, and flatten it slightly. I then press chunks of chopped chocolate onto the top. You can add some of the chocolate dust from chopping too. Then I squeeze it back into a ball, and place it on the baking sheet.

This means that when the cookie bakes, the chocolate will end up spread across the top of the cookie, and give you those big chocolate puddles on the tops. If you are freezing your cookie dough, do this step before they go into the freezer. You can't squish frozen dough!

How to keep cookies fresh

Store chocolate chip cookies in an airtight container at room temperature. To keep them fresh, you can place a marshmallow or a piece of bread in the container with them to help stop them from going stale.

However, I prefer to only bake of the amount of cookie dough that I need, and freeze the rest for another time.

How to freeze chocolate chip cookie dough

This dough freezes perfectly. Scoop it out, chill for an hour, and then bake off whatever you are wanting to bake off. Transfer the rest to a parchment lined baking sheet, and freeze until solid.

This is a flash freeze and should take 30 minutes to an hour. Then, transfer to a ziploc bag and label with the type of cookie dough you have. You can bake it directly from frozen - decrease the baking temperature to 325°f / 165°c and bake for the same amount of time - you may need to add an additional minute or so.

For all my tips and tricks on freezing cookie dough and baking from frozen, check out my post: how to freeze cookie dough

How long does cookie dough last in the fridge?

You can chill your cookie dough for a minimum of an hour before baking, or up to overnight. If you want to make it in advance, cookie dough can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for 3-5 days, although if I know I will not be needing it for some time, I will freeze my cookie dough and bake from frozen.

If you want a no chill cookie recipe my olive oil chocolate chip cookies are great for this - they are also a dairy free variation of a chocolate chip cookie if you need that!

The 'Cookie Scoot' - for perfectly round cookies every time.

The "Cookie Scoot" is my secret weapon to perfectly round cookies. It's a totally optional step, but one that I really love. All you do is take a round object slightly larger than the cookie.

As soon as the cookies come out of the oven, while they are still hot, put the cutter over the cookie and 'scoot' it into a perfectly round shape. The best. I do it basically every time now.

I use a cookie cutter slightly larger than the cookie. I have a set of all different sizes which is made by ateco - it is super handy to just grab the one that you need!

Cookie troubleshooting

There are a couple of things that can go wrong with cookies - they will likely still taste delicious, but there are a few common issues?

Why are my cookies flat?

1. Your baking powder / baking soda is expired so it is not doing the job it is meant to.
2. You did not chill the cookie dough sufficiently before baking
3. The ingredients were too warm, so the cooling period was not enough to chill the dough enough for it to not spread.
4. Your oven is running hot - this is the most common issue. If your oven temperature is off, this will greatly affect the spread of your cookies. Make sure you are baking the recipe according to the oven directions (my recipes are all conventional bake), and make sure your oven is calibrated.
5. You didn't use a scale - time to get one! Baking in cups isn't accurate, and cookies need accuracy!
6. You used a silpat / silicone baking sheet - this causes cookies to spread a lot more than parchment paper due to how slippery they are.

Why did my cookies not spread?

This is a much less common issue, the main culprit is usually oven temperature. I bake my cookies straight from balls of dough - no need to flatten!

1. Your oven temperature is off. If your oven is running cold, it will slow the spread of the cookies.
2. You didn't use a scale - time to get one!

How to customise your chocolate chip cookies

I love to use this easy chocolate chip cookie recipe as a base, and mix things up when it comes to mix-ins.

Feel free to add in things such as candy, peanut butter cups, nuts, etc. I use this recipe as a base for my peanut butter cup cookies and my popcorn cookies, as well as my peanut butter stuffed chocolate chip cookies. I usually keep the weight of the mix-ins the same if I am swapping in things like candy or nuts, and replace some of the chocolate for whatever I am adding. You could also add things like salted caramel chunks like I did in my salted caramel cookies, or pieces of Nutella, piped out and frozen - I did this for my Nutella Cookies and it is amazing.

If you want to play around with the texture, ratio of sugars etc you are welcome to try, but please know I have not tested these so if you make changes, you are making your own recipe, not following mine. I am happy to help suggest other recipes if this one for my perfect chocolate chip cookies does not suit!

For more chocolate chip cookie recipes, check out:

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