Mini Chocolate Chip Cookie Bowls

I've wanted to try this Family Fun idea, since The Idea Room featured it back in May. Last night, I finally got around to it. We used the original Family Fun recipe:

• 1/4 cup shortening


• 1/4 cup butter, softened


• 2/3 cup sugar


• 1 egg


• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract


• 1/2 teaspoon salt


• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder


• 1 1/2 cups flour


• 1/4 cup mini chocolate chips
  

As is normal for these kind of recipes, you cream together the first five ingredients, sift together the next three, and mix them in to the first bowl. Then, you add the chocolate chips.

At this point in the recipe, we diverged from the Family Fun directions. Theirs called for dividing, flattening, and chilling the dough for two hours, and then rolling it out, and cutting it into rounds. That was way too fussy for us! So we just rolled our dough into two inch balls, and then patted them flat by hand.

Before we did that though, we prepared a mini muffin pan. Family Fun used a regular size pan, but we only have a six cup pan, in that size. Besides that, we thought little bowls might be fun. We flipped the pan over, and covered the bottom of every other cup, with tinfoil (I used scissors to cut the squares of tinfoil to about the right size). Then, we sprayed the pan, and tinfoil, with non-stick spray, and smushed our balls of dough down over the tinfoil covered cups. Finally, we baked them for about 12 minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

After, they had baked, and cooled, we removed them from the pan, peeled away the tinfoil, and filled them with ice cream. We were pretty pleased with the results. The only change we might make next time, is to make them a bit thinner (I suppose that's what all that refrigerating, and rolling in the Family Fun directions, was all about).

Tip: Roll any unused dough into one inch balls, and freeze in an air tight container (or even a freezer bag set on top of a cookie sheet). We keep a container of frozen cookie dough in the freezer, and add to it whenever we've got extra dough. Then, when we want some quick cookies, we pop a few of the frozen balls into the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 to 12 minutes, and we're good to go.

It's great to be a homeschooler.