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These chocolate chip cookies from Joanna Gaines' cookbook Magnolia Table are simply amazing! Thick and chewy with perfectly crisp edges, they are a serious contender for the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
I'm a huge Magnolia fan. The whole Chip and Joanna caboodle. They run multiple businesses together, Joanna's interior design literally started the whole farmhouse/modern rustic trend, and her cookbooks are just full of fantastic recipes, including these chocolate chip cookies.
In other words, that's the level I'm aspiring to get on.
I've never met a no-chill chocolate chip cookie that came out this well: crisp edges, chewy gooey middles, nice and rich without getting greasy and oily, and the best part is that you can add as many chocolate chips as you like.
Chocolate chip cookies are not only the most popular cookies in the world, but they're a fairly new concept for a cookie. In 1938, Ruth Graves Wakefield (owner of the Toll House Inn and chef) chopped up a Nestle chocolate bar and added it to cookie dough creating the famous Toll House Cookie, which is the first chocolate chip cookie recipe.
How to Make Magnolia Table Chocolate Chip Cookies from Scratch
The ingredients for this cookie recipe are standard: flour, butter, baking soda, egg, vanilla, sugar. But it's the tweaks to the recipe that make these chocolate chip cookies so good.
Brown Sugar instead of White
In baking, there's a lot of chemistry going on. It's totally different from making a stew or pasta dish or something.
Using brown sugar instead of white sugar is key in these cookies. The leavener in them is baking soda. Baking soda, with the help of an acid, lifts baked goods and makes them lighter, resulting in a thick, soft, and fluffier cookie.
The acid used here is the molasses in brown sugar. The entire sugar content in Magnolia Table's chocolate chip cookies is strictly brown sugar. While white sugar leads to a crisp and strictly sweet cookie, brown sugar has moisture, acidity, and deeper flavor thanks to its molasses content.
So not only does it activate the baking soda and make the cookies fluffy, but it adds moistness and gives depth to the flavor of your cookies. Brown sugar for the win.
It's all about the butter
In many cookie recipes, including my Levain Chocolate Chip Cookies copycat, you're going to be looking at a cup (that's two sticks) of butter for a recipe around this size. This recipe surprisingly uses only half the butter of most recipes.
She also creams the softened butter and brown sugar together, which also makes not only for fluffy cookies but creaming butter makes for even more cookies. And who doesn't want more cookies?
The best part I believe about this recipe is that it's no-chill, meaning you don't need to chill the dough once it's made. This is because the butter is just softened but it's not completely room temperature. When butter is warmer in the dough, it spreads the cookie out as it bakes, and it really spreads when white sugar is used in the dough. If you have ever ended up with flat cookies, warm butter and white sugar together are the culprits.
So this dough gives us thick, fluffy cookies without any chill time thanks to the slightly-still-chilled butter and the brown sugar. I told y'all this was science. These chocolate chip cookies are scientifically delicious.
Looking for more fantastic cookie recipes? Check out:
Recommended Tools
- Two baking sheets
- Parchment Paper to line the baking sheets
- Cookie Scoops, which makes each cookie equal size and shape so they bake evenly
You can buy Joanna's cookbooks Magnolia Table, Vol 1 and Vol 2 on Amazon and bookstores!
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Magnolia Table Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- 2 ½ cups 300g all-purpose flour
- 1 heaping teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon sea salt
- 8 tablespoon 1 stick or 110g unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 2 cups 400g packed light brown sugar
- 2 large eggs, room temperature
- 1 ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
- Up to 2 cups, 350g semisweet chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) with a rack in the center position. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
- In a medium-sized mixing bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, baking soda, and sea salt. Set aside.
- In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (or in a large bowl with a strong handheld electric mixer), beat the softened butter and sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, and beat until blended before each addition. Add the vanilla extract to the butter mixture and beat until blended.
- Turn the stand mixer off and add the flour mixture to the bowl of the butter mixture. Mix on medium speed just until the flour is mixed in, then turn the mixer to high speed for a few seconds to pull the dough together; it will be chunky.
- Add the chocolate chips and beat on high for about 5 seconds to thoroughly and quickly mix in the chocolate chips.
- Drop the cookie dough by large spoonfuls (I personally use cookie scoops since it makes equal sized cookies that bake evenly every time) onto the parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake the cookies in your preheated oven until the cookies are lightly browned on top, about 10 to 11 minutes.
- Cool on the pan on a rack for 1 minute, then transfer the cookies to a wire cooling rack to cool completely. Repeat steps 6 and 7 with the remaining dough until all cookies are baked.
- Store the chocolate chip cookies in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
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