I sincerely believe the essence of a cookie distills down to the 1:2:3 cookie. The recipe is simple enough you can bake it blindfolded with a single hand: you mix one part of sugar with two parts of butter and fold in with three parts flour. Plus, it offers endless opportunities for improvisation: you can change the proportions, decide what type of sugar or flour to use, add cocoa powder, extracts, nuts, seeds, whatever you want, and this cookie will not fail you.
There is a general rule of thumb about how the three primary ingredients interact. More butter makes it softer; more sugar makes it crispier and brittle (think caramelization), and more flour makes it crumblier and softer. Some people find the basic 1:2:3 version a little too soft and crumbly; ideal for dunking in tea maybe but a little too dry to eat the cookies by themselvs.
I have been meaning to try several variations of the 1:2:3 ratio and discovering four sticks of soon-to-expire butter in my fridge afforded an opportunity. First, I measured all the sticks and this is when I realized a strange irregular: the butter, marked to be 113g, only measures 99g. And yes, the scales are working correctly. This feels like a case of false advertising, but I don’t have the energy to pursue this further.
I made four batches with the following ratio:
| Sugar | Butter | Flour | Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | Vanilla + Walnuts |
| 2 | 1.2 | 2 | 2.8 | Vanilla + Walnuts |
| 3 | 0.8 | 2 | 3.2 | Vanilla + Walnuts |
| 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 | Walnuts + 1 Tbsp cocoa powder |
And here are the results:
As I had expected, I prefer the second batch with slightly higher proportion of sugar.