Cookie lovers are a persnickety breed. Some like soft chocolate chip cookies, cookies that taste like they just came out of the oven. Others like their chocolate chip cookies thin, crispy and crackly, the butter browned and the cookie flat and melt-in-your-mouth. And then occasionally you get acookie monster like me, somebody who likes them all: soft, crispy, even underbaked—as long as they have a sprinkling of flaky sea salt on top.
For folks who are into soft chocolate chip cookies,Delish's hack to guaranteeing soft, chewy cookies—simply by swapping cream cheese for butter in a chocolate chip cookie dough—is something that can't be ignored. I had to check it out.
Delish took this experiment to the extreme by replacing all the butter in a classic chocolate chip cookie with cream cheese. The result is a fat, soft cookie that they describe as being like "cookie clouds." Sounds interesting, but I wanted a more traditional chocolate chip cookie. I just wanted it soft.
So I went to the test kitchen. I pulled upOur Favorite Chocolate Chiprecipe (a decidedly crispy cookie recipe), and rather than swapping out all the butter for cream cheese, I swapped out only 1/3 of the butter (a little more than 3 tablespoons in this case), in order to keep the original recipe as in tact as possible. (It's best to not veer too far from a recipe you know works, dear readers. Adventurous bakers can findmore tips for adjusting and reworking recipes here.)
The results? When compared to the crispy and thin originals, the batch made with cream cheese was just what the soft-cookie lover ordered: Very soft, like freshly-baked cookies. Perfect for soft-cookie lovers—and for cookie monsters like me.
