Easy Festive Chocolate Chip Cookies

Looking for a quick last-minute recipe? This recipe is the one for you. Most cookie recipes require chill time before baking the cookies. However, in this recipe, you can bake your cookies pretty much straight away. Alternatively, you can make the dough in advance and store the cookie dough in the freezer until you are ready to bake it. 

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Here is a list of ingredients you will need: 

Butter: When making sugar cookies use block butter rather than spreads and margarines. Spreadable butter has more liquid fats which causes your cookies to spread too much when they bake, resulting in a less defined design.

Sugar: Granulated sugar will help your cookies spread more compared to caster sugar. Light brown sugar creates a soft chewy texture.

Egg: Make sure your eggs are at room temp. Room-temperature eggs will combine more easily than cold eggs. An additional yolk will enrich the flavour and texture. 

Golden Syrup: This is the secret to keeping your cookies perfectly soft and chewy for longer. It also makes the cookies taste and smell amazing. 

Flour: When making cookies use ‘Plain’ or ‘All-purpose’ flour. 

Chocolate: I used both milk and white chocolate in this recipe. Feel free to use all milk chocolate all white or even dark chocolate.

Tips & Tricks for Perfect Cookies 

• When Mixing cookie dough, try to avoid overmixing, it might seem like an easy thing to say, but sometimes you might not realise when you're constantly adding ingredients you can easily get distracted. Most of the time I will say mix until ‘just combined’.

• Use room temperature ingredients. Allowing the eggs to return to room temperature before starting will allow them to combine more easily with the dry ingredients creating a well-combined dough.
• When rolling the cookie dough into balls try to avoid rolling them too tightly. I usually clump the dough 2-3 times in my hand rather than rolling it into tight balls. Trust me your cookies will spread perfectly and look so much better.
• If the dough feels a little sticky to work with leave the dough to sit for 5-10minutes before dividing the dough.
• Space the dough out enough on the baking trays, they will spread as they bake.
• Finally don’t overbake your cookies. The cookie might look underdone in the middle, but trust me they will continue to bake on the tray from the residual heat.

Decorating: 

To make these tempting cookies a perfect treat for Christmas Eve, decorate a small section of the cookies with fun festive sprinkles and a few chocolate stars. 

To help the sprinkles stick I used melted milk chocolate in a piping bag to create a neat drizzle across each cookie. For sprinkles, I used red, white and green strands. I also used a few white chocolate stars.

To melt the chocolate I used the microwave method. Which involves heating the chocolate in 10-15 second bursts and giving the chocolate a mix during every interval. To make the chocolate a drizzle consistency I added a teaspoon of vegetable oil. 

Equipment: 

Below I’ve created a list of equipment I used for this recipe. There is a good chance you already have some, if not all, of the following. 

^{(Also I have attached the link to each product to make it easier for you to find, if your interested).}

Mixing Bowls: 

For this recipe, I used my medium pink Mason cash bowl. Any medium/large mixing bowl will work just fine.

Whisk:

In this recipe, I used a double ballon whisk, with an aerator ball whisk inside. The tiny ball helps aerate the mixture but also breaks down any lumps of sugar. It’s a fancy kitchen utensil for sure, but it’s so worth it. 

Baking Trays:

When making cookies two good quality baking trays will work perfectly. A thin tray can cause the bottom of your cookies to overbake or even burn. If you only have thin trays double the tray to make the layer thicker. When I first started learning to bake cookies the bottoms of the cookies would always come out burnt and it was because of my thin trays, so when I figured this out I used the double tray technique until I found good baking trays. 

Kitchen Scale:

I can’t bake without one. Baking is all about using accurate measurements. Kitchen scales give accurate readings which means there is less room for errors when measuring your ingredients. I sometimes use scales to measure out liquids too. 

Piping Bags:

Of course, I had to use the Pipe to Perfection piping bags. They are slightly thicker than the average piping bags, which means you don’t have to worry about your piping bags bursting all over your desserts when decorating. The packaging is also designed as a dispenser for easy use and storage.