Baking – Cookies are too sweet

I like my chocolate chip cookies chewy too and I do it all the time. Here is what I do:

• Flour: I use a higher gluten flour instead of AP, such as Bread flour.
• Eggs: An additional egg yolk will help
• Sugar: A bigger Brown Sugar to Sugar ratio helps but not vital if you do not have brown sugar at hand.
• Butter: Butter should be melted. I think this is the key to chewiness.

The recipe is straightforward: cream butter with sugar, add wet ingredients, incorporate dry ingredients slowly and lastly add the chips.

Be sure to chill the dough for at least 30 min. The more you rest, the better. See this NY Times Article for effects of resting the dough.

This looks to me like the symptoms of too much flour - probably way too much.

Measuring baking ingredients by volume instead of weight is always a crapshoot, although it shouldn't be that far off - my guess is that either the flour was heavily compacted, or perhaps the baker's mind wandered off and she accidentally added an extra cup.

Overmixing (i.e. by using an electric mixer) is a common problem with cookies but the symptom of that is a hard and gritty cookie that doesn't rise - not one that rises too much and has unbaked flour in the center. As far as I know, that can only happen with a huge amount of flour. Obviously, too much flour would also result in a much denser dough.

What you ended up with seems to be more like a quickbread - almost a scone - and there is indeed not an awful lot of difference between the two aside from the ratios and the creaming of butter.

Excess flour probably wouldn't result in a stickier dough, but stickiness is more due to temperature than anything else. If you're finding the dough too sticky to mold then make sure it's thoroughly chilled - that will make it easier to work with.