Recipe Review: Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

This recipe is from Allrecipes.com. See the original recipe here.

With 4.5 stars and almost 2,800 reviews, I figured this one was a sure-fire hit. Plus, they're chocolate chip cookies! Even the recipe provided on the back of the bag turns out great cookies. Reading reviews like these convinced me I had found a winner.

"They're rich and buttery, with crispy outsides, and a soft but chewey [sic] inside."

"They turn out fabulous every time!"

"I like many others have been searching and searching for a really good chocolate chip cookie recipe and I finally found it!"

Also? Read the name! I doubted that level of hubris would be allowed to remain long with so many reviews.

However, this is what I got: 40 crunchy, too-thin cookies, with the chips left stranded like the islands of an ancient sea. They don't taste... bad, although how you could get a bad-tasting result from a recipe involving almost as much sugar as flour, I'm not sure. We've been eating them (for, ahem, breakfast) (with a glass of milk! that makes it healthy!) (Right?) and enjoying the chocolatey goodness, but I'm certainly not going to put them out at the cookie-swap this Friday.

So what happened? I think that I didn't use enough flour. The dough is really sticky and when it runs away like that it's generally considered to be lack of thickening agent, aka flour. I've heard all about how scooping flour out of the bin with the measuring cup packs it in and leads to doughy and bland goodies, so this time (because I really wanted these to be great!) I used a spoon to fill my measuring cup. Then I weighed the flour (taring out the weight of the cup of course) and proceeded to weigh out the rest of the flour I needed. I guess it was... not enough? Perhaps the original recipe relied upon people doing the regular scoop method? I doubled the recipe so I still have half of the dough. I'm going to add more flour to it and try again.

Update: I added 4 oz more flour and they cooked up a treat! But they're still not as awesome as those reviews suggested. They're good. I mean, they're chocolate-mint chip cookies. But the best? Maybe not.