Fighting Irish Chocolate Chip Cookies

Have you ever played ‘whisper down the lane’? Cindy Burke’s cookie recipe is a little like that game. Now on its third recipe revision, with tweaks along the way, I can only assume that the original recipe must have been delicious because Cindy’s version of the cookies is awesome.

I encountered Cindy’s cookies a few weeks ago as I was leaving a meeting on the 7^th floor of my company. A box of homemade chocolate chip cookies sat on a long table near the photocopier and water cooler. Now I normally don’t eat food from the 7^th floor (each floor being somewhat proprietary about their snacks) but these cookies just looked so inviting. They were huge, perfectly round and flat. After glancing around to make sure no one saw me, I grabbed a cookie and headed back to my office on the 12^th floor. Standing in the wood-paneled elevator, I took a nibble and wow was it good. By the time I got back to my office I had finished the cookie so I dropped off my meeting notes and headed back down to track down the source of this chocolate-chip excellence. An administrative assistant told me that Mike McDonald’s Aunt Cindy had made them. Luckily, Mike is a nice guy and agreed to connect me to his aunt.

Cindy grew up in South Bend, Indiana. As she was growing up, she was friends with 2 girls, Krissie and Karan, daughters of Ara Parseghian, football coach for a little college football team named Notre Dame. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? During his reign, Parseghian led the team to two national championships. Being friends with Parseghian’s daughters meant lots of time spent at football parties on the weekends. This is where Cindy got her first taste of Aunt Janice’s chocolate chip cookies. This is the source of our ‘whisper down the lane’ recipe.

Aunt Janice (Parseghian’s sister-in-law) would bring batches of incredible chocolate chip cookies with her every time she came to South Bend for a football game. Season after season included football, family, fun and cookies. By the mid-80s, Janice had passed her cookie recipe down to her niece Krissie (Parseghian’s daughter). Krissie made some modifications to the recipe and began a cookie business. According to Cindy, Krissie’s business, ‘Yo Mama’s Cookies’ delivered cookies to students at Notre Dame and can even list Olympian and Food Network Celebrity, Brain Boitano, amongst its fans. After a few years, Krissie gave up the cookie business in favor of a new endeavor—Krissie’s Kritters (hand-made holiday ornaments at www.krissiesornaments.com). Krissie gave the cookie recipe to Cindy who tweaked it a bit as well and began making them for friends and family. So the cookie I ate was based on a recipe from Janice, who gave it to Krissie, who passed it to Cindy, who made them for her nephew Mike, who put them out by the 7^th floor water cooler for people to enjoy. Whew! You could almost sing that last sentence to the tune of ‘there was an old woman who swallowed a fly.’

Cindy says these cookies are for good times and bad times, for friends, for funerals, and for birthday parties. She made them for her son’s football games in high school. Her version of the recipe has been around for approximately 20 years now. She uses a different ratio of butter to Crisco and includes more chocolate chips, but the most of the main ingredients remain the same (see full recipe below). Please note: For this entry, I interviewed Cindy by phone and made the cookies myself. The photos you see are all from my own attempts at baking. Any flaws you may see in a less-than-perfect final product is due to my poor cooking skills—not the actual recipe. For the record, Cindy’s cookies are addictively tasty and beautifully made. Also, I came up with the name for them. I wanted something that tied back to their Notre Dame roots.

I started by combining the flour, baking soda and salt. Then I beat in the butter, Crisco, sugars and vanilla and mixed it until it was creamy. Just to warn you, there is a lot of Crisco and butter in this recipe. When Cindy sent the recipe to Mike to give to me, she thought, ‘when people see what’s in the recipe, they’ll clutch their chest. These cookies are not light on fat or calories.’ This is an understatement. These cookies use more Crisco than I eat in a year. But, they are worth it and you can really taste the difference. Cookies I’ve made before may be less fattening, but they don’t taste as rich. As Cindy says, ‘if you are making something to give to people, don’t skimp on ingredients. Make it the best you can. There are certain times I don’t believe in everything in moderation—parties, celebrations, enjoy it!’ To this end, she also recommends using Mexican Vanilla. My cookies were made without it because I only had the regular extract on hand at the time. I tried 3 places to find this ingredient but they didn’t carry Mexican Vanilla. To my internet fans (all 3 of you). Next time you are in Mexico, please bring me back some vanilla. Thanks.

Next, the eggs went into the batter and which was beaten until smooth. Then I added the flour mixture followed by ground up walnuts. Cindy’s secret is to use finely ground walnuts—not roughly chopped. I put them in a little coffee bean grinder and whirred away until they were a fine powder. I’m usually not a fan of nuts in my cookies, but the addition of the walnut powder made everything moist. The cookies turned out perfectly—a little crisp around the edges and soft in the center. Plus their flavor was more complex than my usual chocolate chip cookie. I attribute this to the walnuts.

After I added in the walnut powder, I focused on the chocolate chips. Cindy buys her chips in bulk from one of those warehouse/price-club places and now I know why. Oh my goodness it’s a lot of chocolate chips. It’s a mountain of chocolate chips. It probably would have been even more chips but I ate a few handfuls of them along the way.

After the cookie batter was mixed, I put it into the refrigerator. This is another one of Cindy’s secrets—She lets the dough cool off for a while so the cookies don’t spread out too much when baked. The leftover dough (and there will be a ton of leftover dough), goes into plastic bags and is then frozen for future use. I love this idea. Now, the next time I go to a party I’ll just pull the dough out of the freezer, let it defrost and then have cookies ready in minutes. The only challenging part about this is when I have a tough day, it’s hard to resist the call of ready-made cookie dough just waiting for me in the freezer.

To get the dough out of the bowl and onto an insulated cookie sheet, Cindy recommends using a few different kinds of scoops. For larger cookies she has something a little bigger than a melon baller, about 1 ¾ inches in diameter. For smaller cookies, she uses a scoop made by the Chip Clip company. Once the dough is on the sheet, Cindy bakes it for about 10-12 minutes at 350-370 degrees Fahrenheit. She says she has a slow oven and that other ovens may cook faster so plan accordingly. After about 8 minutes, she takes the cookie sheets, bangs them against the oven racks and then rotates them in the oven to let them cook for another few minutes. It’s this combination of scoop, banging and rotating that produces such uniformly round, flat cookies.

One of the fun parts about writing this blog has been getting to meet some really great people. Cindy, pictured here on the right with her 2 daughters, son, and soon to be daughter in law, is not just a good cook, but is also an incredibly nice person. After talking to her on the phone, I wanted to move out to Wyomissing, PA just so she can be my next-door neighbor. Married for 36 years, Cindy enjoys following golfer Phil Mickelson, and roots for both Notre Dame and Penn State. Most Notre Dame fans don’t root for the Nittany Lions but her kids are all Penn State alumni and she’s supportive of her kids. I never got around to telling Cindy that I went to the University of Miami. We normally don’t root for Notre Dame or Penn State. However, this cookie recipe is so good, I might be willing to make an exception. After all, it’s thanks to Coach Parseghian and his sister-in-law Janice that I now have a fantastic recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Go Irish!

 Lessons Learned:

-I have a fast oven. My cookies didn’t flatten even though I banged them against the rack. I called Cindy back and she said I could either flatten them a bit with my fingers before baking them (Krissie’s method), or try flattening them earlier in the cooking process.
-Kevin loves this recipe. LOVES IT. He ate every single cookie off of one sheet. This is the same guy who walked away after eating ½ of a chocolate chip scone. Note to self: bake these for Kevin’s soccer team.
- Dear Wegmans, DiBruno Brothers and Shop Rite, why don’t you have Mexican Vanilla? Ok Shop Rite, you’re off the hook—my expectations are lower for you anyway.  But Wegmans? First you stopped carrying my favorite fig jam and now no Mexican Vanilla? I’m disappointed in you Wegmans. I’ll always love you, but I’m disappointed right now.

 Fighting Irish Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

1 cup butter (2 sticks)
1 cup Crisco butter (1 stick)
1 cup Crisco regular (1 stick)
2 ½ cups sugar
2 ½ cups light brown sugar
4 tablespoons vanilla (Mexican vanilla if you can get it)
5 eggs (jumbo)
1 tablespoon baking soda (heaping)
4 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking powder (heaping)
8 cups of flour (gold medal)
3 cups ground/chopped walnuts
6 cups Nestle semi sweet chips (Cindy buys the 72 oz chips at Sam’s Club so it is approx ½ of the bag)

 Mix together as directed by Tollhouse Recipe on their chocolate chips bag.

Then, for best baking results, put dough in 2 ziplock freezer bags and freeze or at least refrigerate. When taken from freezer, put in refrigerator for a few hours. Cindy uses a small ice cream scoop for the big cookies and lines them up about one dozen per cookie sheet.

 Bake 350-375 for 10-12 minutes until light golden brown. Cool on cookie sheet for 5 minutes then on rack for about 20 minutes.

 Yields 8-9 dozen cookies

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