Recipe: The Only Chocolate-Chip Cookie Recipe You’ll Ever Need, According to Emelia Jackson

Emelia Jackson knows she’s onto a good thing with this superlative cookie recipe, which is aptly titled “the only chocolate-chip cookie recipe you’ll ever need”.

“If you recognise these beauties, you must be the proud owner of my first book, First, Cream the Butter and Sugar,” writes Jackson, winner of Masterchef Australia: Back to Win in 2020 and a contestant in the current season of Dessert Masters. “When writing this cookie book, I was very conscious to not include recipes from my original tome … but with a name like this one, how could I not double up just this once?”

You might say Jackson is an authority on the art of the cookie – her new cookbook is titled Some of My Best Friends Are Cookies, making this recipe’s appearance for the second time a sound endorsement. “These cookies are chewy and crisp, overloaded with chocolate and downright luxe,” she writes. “If you notice something different about it, it’s that I’ve halved the recipe – the original makes 40 cookies, which is fairly indulgent, even for me.”

Alongside the classic choc-chip recipe, Jackson offers several alternatives, including a white chocolate, sour cherry and pistachio version, and one with blueberry, lemon and white chocolate. Read to the bottom of the recipe for swaps, as well as tips for achieving a perfectly round cookie.

Start these a day ahead to give the dough time to rest.

Makes 20
Preparation time: 20 minutes, plus 12–36 hours refrigeration, 15 minutes cooling
Cooking time: 12–14 minutes

280g plain flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp sea salt flakes, plus extra for sprinkling (for that salty “pop”)
150g unsalted butter, softened
150g brown sugar
100g caster sugar
1 egg, at room temperature
2 tsp vanilla bean paste
250g dark chocolate chips

Combine the flour, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Give these dry ingredients a good whisk and set aside. Using an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter, sugars, egg and vanilla. (I add the egg at this point because the added moisture helps the butter really cream up.)

Add all of the dry ingredients and the chocolate chips to the butter mixture and mix until just combined. Do not overmix the dough once the flour has been added – you don’t want to develop any of the gluten in the flour, as this will leave you with a tough cookie.

This is the hardest step of all: refrigerate your cookie dough for 12–36 hours before baking (see note below). The longer you refrigerate the dough, the more flavour development will occur, the less the cookies will spread and the better the overall texture will be. Seems worth it, hey?

When you’re ready to bake your cookies, preheat the oven to 180°C fan-forced. Line two baking trays with baking paper or silicone baking mats. Place six golf ball-sized rounds of dough on each tray, using about 50g dough for each one. The cookies will spread, so give them space to do their thing. Sprinkle with extra sea salt flakes. Bake the cookies in batches for 12–14 minutes or until they’re caramelised around the edges but still soft and blond towards the centre. To get your cookies perfectly round, see below.

Allow the cookies to cool on the trays for 15 minutes before transferring to a wire rack, then dive in, head first. I always recommend eating the cookies with a cup of tea or coffee to ensure you can handle eating six in a sitting. We don’t want that “back of the throat” sugar build-up to hold you back from full enjoyment!

You can refrigerate the cookie dough for anywhere between 12 and 36 hours (or even longer if you wish, and you can even freeze the rolled dough balls). My general recommendation is 24 hours. If you just can’t help yourself, you can bake a few cookies immediately and refrigerate the rest of the dough for the following day. Run your own experiments with timing and decide whether or not you think it makes a difference. The dough will be really firm once chilled, so you can roll the dough balls in advance and refrigerate them, ready to bake.

Leave out the dark chocolate chips and you have a great base recipe for any flavoured drop cookie. Here are some suggestions:

White chocolate, sour cherry and pistachio cookies: Add 175g white chocolate chips, 60g dried sour cherries and 60g roasted pistachios.

Blueberry, lemon and white chocolate cookies: Add 200g white chocolate chips, 30g freeze-dried blueberries and the grated zest of 1 lemon.

Milk chocolate hazelnut crunch cookies: Add 175g milk chocolate chips, 75g roughly chopped roasted hazelnuts and 25g crispy dark chocolate pearls.

1: Remove the tray of cookies from the oven a couple of minutes before they’ve finished baking. You want them to still be soft to allow for some shaping action.

2: Take a cookie cutter, ring cutter or anything round that’s slightly wider than your cookies. I have a pack of ring cutters that has about 10 different sizes in it. I highly recommend buying one.

3: Place the cutter over one of the piping-hot cookies and move it around in a circular motion, shaping the cookie as you move the cutter. Watch as your cookie goes from a randomly spread shape to a perfect circle, right before your eyes.

4: Repeat with the remaining cookies, then return your cookies to the oven for the final couple of minutes of baking.

And here’s another free tip: perfectly placed chocolate chips can be added on top of your cookies as soon as you pull them out of the oven. The chocolate chips will melt with the heat but still hold their form and reset as the cookies cool, without burning the chocolate. Simple and pretty as a picture.

Images and text from Some of My Best Friends Are Cookies by Emelia Jackson, photography by Armelle Habib, illustrations by Andrea Smith. Murdoch Books RRP $39.99.