French Vanilla Chocolate Chip Pudding Cookies

So, I happen to have a realllly great chocolate chip cookie recipe.  But, I’m always looking for a better one.  I’m looking for one that will make me say “Wowza!”  This, is not that recipe.  However, if you’re looking for a moist chocolate chip cookie that stays soft for a long time, this is your recipe.  A friend of mine who was singing the praises of these cookies ended the conversation with, “I guess I’m just a cookie simpleton.”  Well, I guess that makes me a cookie snob. . .

Anywho, as I looked around for a recipe to try, I noticed a lot of people raving about cookie recipes that have dry pudding mix in them.  So, I decided to give it a whirl.  I basically combined a whole bunch of different recipes into one and here is what I came up with:

Here’s what I used:

1 Cup of Butter, Room Temperature

¾ Cup Light Brown Sugar

¼ White Sugar

5 oz French Vanilla Pudding Mix

2 Eggs

1¼  Tsp Vanilla

1 Tsp Baking Soda

1 Tsp Salt

2 ¼ Cups All Purpose White Flour

3 Cups Chocolate Chips

¼ Cup 2% Milk

Here’s what I did:

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees.  Then I creamed the butter and both sugars together.  I added the pudding mix to the creamed butter and mixed well. 

     Hint:  I didn’t have any butter at room temperature when I wanted to make these cookies, so I preheated

     the oven, took the butter out of the refrigerate and cut it into small cubes.  I then put the cubed butter in

     a bowl and set the bowl on top of the preheating oven.  I left the bowl there while I gathered the rest of

     my ingredients and by the time I was ready to cream the butter and sugars, the butter was close to

     room temperature.

My local store did not have a 5 oz box of French Vanilla Pudding, so I bought two smaller boxes and guessed about how much pudding I was using. 

I added the eggs and vanilla to the dough and made sure they were mixed well.

In a separate bowl, I combined the Baking Soda, Salt and Flour.  

I slowly poured the dry ingredients into the dough and mixed it all together.  Finally I added the chocolate chips. 

I like LOTS of chocolate chips in my cookies, so you may want to decrease or increase the amount of chocolate chips you use, depending on how you like your cookies.  Towards the end of mixing everything together, my dough seemed a little dry, so I added the Milk to moisten everything up. 

I rolled the dough into balls and placed them on an ungreased cookie sheet. 

I put them in the oven to bake for about 10 minutes.  Start checking your cookies at about 8 minutes to make sure you don’t overbake them.  This is what mine looked like fresh out of the oven:   

 

This recipe made about 72 cookies for me, but I make really small cookies – almost bite sized. 

Enjoy!