I have a bunch of cream cheese in my fridge. I don’t know why. I think maybe I put it on my grocery list when I was getting ready for Christmas baking and forgot to check it off. So I kept buying it every time I went to the store? I don’t know. But anyway, I don’t really eat cream cheese regularly so I need to think of something to do with it. It expires mid-May so you’ll probably be seeing a bunch of cream cheese recipes coming up!
Anyway, last night I was wondering what would happen if I replaced the butter in a cookie recipe with cream cheese. Because I thought there might be a huge difference, I only replaced half of the butter. And since I wanted it to be a familiar recipe so I could compare the results with what the cookies are normally like, I just went with good old Toll House cookies. So the recipe below is seriously just Toll House cookies with cream cheese.
Long story short, the cookies aren’t that different! I expected them to spread quite a bit more but in fact they ended up spreading much less. I tried three different methods of forming the cookies: drop cookies, rolled balls, and rolled balls flattened into discs. The cream cheese held its shape so much that the drop cookies had too much texture for my liking. With regular Toll House cookies you can drop the dough into ragged drops and they smooth out while baking. Definitely not the case with this dough. The rolled balls stayed pretty thick when baked. If you want a thick cookie, go with the rolled balls. But if you want a traditional cookie shape, definitely go with the flattened discs.
I will say these cookies seem to be staying soft longer than regular Toll House cookies. So if you’re looking for more of a Chips Ahoy Soft Batch texture then this is your cookie! These are moist and soft without being super chewy. Just right!
Super-thick Chocolate Chip Cookies
- 1 stick butter
- 1/2 cup cream cheese
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 375 F. Soften the butter and cream cheese. I never think far enough ahead to do this, so I just beat them in the mixer until they’re soft. (This is one of those secrets to how I get stuff done after work. I got home this day around 8 PM and I’m an early to bed kind of girl these days)
Cream in the sugars.
Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
Add the dry ingredients and mix.
If I had my druthers, I’d totally just bake up the dough looking like this.
But people seem to like chocolate, so add those chips in!
If you want ragged-looking cookies, then just drop by the spoonful onto your cookie sheet.
Bake about 10-12 minutes. Here’s what the cookies look like if you just drop the dough like I’ve shown above:
Because the cream cheese prevented the cookies from spreading, they just didn’t smooth out like they normally do. I didn’t think to take pictures of what the cookies looked like when I baked balls of dough, but those were pretty thick (my mom liked those a lot). Here’s a picture of the resulting cookies when I baked flattened discs of dough:
