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This is my variation Kirby's Soft Chocolate Chip cookies from here. I kept making it and tweaking it slightly until I came up with a version that my wife likes :)
* 2 3/8 cups of flour (Measuring 3/8 cup can be a pain if you don't have a 1/8 cup measure, so just guess. The flour doesn't have to be exact)
* 1 Teaspoon baking soda
* 1 Cup of Butter (2 sticks) (Different combinations of country crock and butter are fine, and probably won't affect the results too much. Just make sure you use a total of slightly more than one cup of buttery-oil-type-stuff)
* 1 heaping teaspoon of Country Crock
* 1 1/4 cup of Sugar. (I use turbanado, but any mixture of table sugar, brown sugar, turbanado, or anything that isn't powdered sugar should be fine.)
* 1 package of instant vanlla pudding mix. (These are usually 3.4 oz)
* 2 eggs
* 2 teaspoons of vanilla
* As many dang chocolate chips as you can manage to stuff in (Preferably a mixture of different kinds of chips. I use dark chocolate chunks, dark chocolate chips, butterscotch chips and white chocolate chips. M&M's work too, but don't use nothing else but M&Ms because they don't melt and spread. Nuts and raisins are fine too if you are into that sort of thing. In my opinion they consume valuable chocolate-space)
Mix the flour and the baking soda together in a bowl, set it aside.
Melt the butter and country crock under very low heat in a pan. Take care not to burn the butter.
After you have turned off the heat for the butter, pour the sugar into the butter and mix them. The heat of the butter will help melt the sugar. It doesn't matter if the sugar remains grainy after mixing. Don't wear your arm off mixing.
Now get a food processor or a power mixer, and dump in the sugary butter. Then add the pudding mix, eggs and vanilla. Mix them all together nicely. When fully mixed, the pudding will have taken over, and the whole thing will seem pudding-like. If you don't have a food processor or blender or mixer or something, and you want to mix by hand, I feel your pain. It will be a good workout.
Now dump the pudding-sugar-eggey stuff into the bowl where you left the flour and baking soda. Mix them by hand (or very gently by power mixer) Try to get most of the flour mixed in, but it doesn't have to be perfect.
Now add your masses of chocolate chips and stuff. According to Kirbie's recipe scaled to this one you would use 2 cups. I don't think that is enough. Try 2 1/2 to 3-ish. Mix them in haphazardly.
The finished dough does not need to be chilled. There is no need to let it rest. You can cook it right away if you want.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. (this is low enough that you can do a mini-batch in a toaster-oven if you wish!)
Put aluminium foil on your cookie-sheet for easy cleanup. There is no need to oil the sheet (or oil the foil) They are not likely to stick.
I make each cookie a glob of dough the size of a golf ball. They work well smaller too. Don't bother smoothing or shaping them. They will melt into a nice shape on their own as they cook no matter how lumpy the dough-glob.
Leave some space around them, as they will flatten and spread a little, but you don't need a ton of space. They remain thick after cooking.
Cook for 9 minutes. If you want to play it safe, just put one or two dough-blobs on the cookie tray for the first time, so you can test if your oven runs hotter or cooler than mine.
No special care is needed for cooling them. Just let them cool for 2 or 3 minutes so they don't fall apart when you spatula them off the tray, then move them to a plate or your belly or wherever to finish cooling.
These cookies remain soft forever. You can refrigerate them, freeze-and-thaw them, store them at room temperature, re-heat them in a toaster-oven, whatever. They remain tender and soft pretty much no matter what you do.
Once again, thanks to Kirbie for the recipe that this is based upon.
