Joanna Gaines’ Chocolate Chip Cookies
A familiar, approachable cookie with a soft chew and plenty of sweet chocolate flavor.
Joanna Gaines and Chocolate Chip Cookies? I know. When you think of Joanna Gaines, you probably think first of shiplap and home renovations, but at this point she actually has three cookbooks under her belt so why not turn to her for your chocolate chip cookie recipe needs? And there’s no reason not to. Her Chocolate Chip Cookies turn out to be much like she is — approachable, familiar, and they make you feel right at home. They remind me of cookies I had countless times when going home with friends after school as a kid. They’re the classic kind of cookie everybody’s mom made, all the time.
While Joanna Gaines isn’t a celebrity “chef” per se, she was a perfect celebrity to include in our Celebrity Chocolate Chip Cookie Showdown, where we cooked and compared four celebrity cookie recipes to see which one we loved the most. This match-up included Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, Joanna Gaines, and Ree Drummond. It gave us four chocolate chip cookies that were all very different from each other but all pretty tasty in their own right! (And it was just a really, really fun day of work.)
Joanna’s recipe had the least amount of ingredients of all the recipes. Just the basics like flour, baking soda, salt, butter, egg, vanilla, and semisweet chocolate chips. The most unique aspect of her recipe was that she relies entirely on brown sugar for sweetness with no white sugar included at all. That simplifies matters, for sure!
She doesn’t require any special methods and uses a basic creaming method where you then whisk together the dry ingredients before mixing them in. The chocolate chips get mixed in with the mixer as well so they get broken up just a tad. And then there’s no chilling or freezing or any other steps — just scoop and bake, so you get to eating cookies pretty darn quickly.
They’re done in just ten minutes, which is great news.
So what’s the verdict?
If you like a doughier cookie, these are for you. All that brown sugar gives them a very nice chew but there’s not a ton of brown sugar flavor. They rely mostly on chocolate for flavor and there’s plenty of that. They were a little too soft to be my perfect cookie but I am rather fond of a crisp-edged cookie and not everyone is. They’re rustic and homey though, and really do feel just like the homemade chocolate chip cookie that you can expect from any mom, anywhere.
See our Celebrity Chocolate Chip Cookie Showdown to see how the others matched up.
Joanna Gaines' Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 heaping teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 2 cups light brown sugar, packed
- 2 large eggs
- 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Preparation
- Place a rack in the center of your oven and preheat oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Set aside.
- In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
- In a mixing bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar with an electric mixer on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes.
- Add eggs and beat until well blended. Add vanilla and once more beat until blended.
- Add flour to bowl, then mix on medium just until combined. Turn mixer to high for a few seconds; dough will still be chunky.
- Add chocolate chips and beat on high again for 5 seconds to quickly mix in the chips.
- Drop in large spoonfuls onto prepared baking sheet, but do not flatten. Bake until lightly brown on top, 10-11 minutes.
- Let cool on pan for 1 minute, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat with remaining dough.
Recipe from Magnolia Table by Joanna Gaines. Copyright © 2018 by Joanna Gaines. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.