whole wheat chocolate chip cookies

I’ve confessed more than once in this space that I’m not a big baker. I do enjoy it more the more that I do it, but I still tend toward things that don’t require as much precision, like cookies and brownies and crisps. We try to only eat sweets at our house when we’ve made them ourselves at home. This seemed like a good idea in practice until all of the sudden I found myself buying half gallons of heavy cream and pounds of butter “just in case” I needed to make ice cream or cookies. I cut myself and the kids a little more slack during the holidays. Some of my best memories from the Christmas season center around food, so I figure that a little extra sugar than normal isn’t the worst thing in the world. Baking cookies seems to go with the seasons too. I don’t find myself craving them much in July when there’s plenty of fresh berries to be had and the last thing I want to do is fire up the oven. When it’s below freezing outside and you’re desperate for your four-year-old to just sit still for five minutes, there is nothing like making cookies to help.

These whole wheat version might be my favorite chocolate chip cookie. I don’t know. I need to have a side-by-side experiment with my old standby. While I wouldn’t argue that they’re healthy by any means, they do have a bit more heft than the all-purpose variety, which hypothetically fills you up faster (or just makes you feel like you can eat twice as many “because they’re made with whole wheat” if you’re Grant). At any rate, they’re consistently delicious and easy, which makes them our go-to cookie.

There really isn’t much better in the sweets category for me than a fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookie, so these days, I typically bake up half the batch and freeze the other half. I go ahead and scoop out the dough onto a cookie sheet and then stick the sheet of cookie-dough-balls in the freezer for the day or so (I have possibly been known to totally forget about them for several days until I get back in the freezer and realize that I should probably do something with that cookie dough). Once they’re frozen, I dump them in a container or ziploc bag and save them for those times when some friends come over unexpectedly or when it just feels like a freshly-baked cookie day. I bake them frozen, but just add about two extra minutes to the baking time.