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These Thick Chocolate Chip Cookies are nice and golden on the outside and soft and gooey on the inside. Loaded up with tons of melted chocolate. The best part is the size. These cookies are thick and hearty
Thick & Gooey Chocolate Chip Cookies
My favorite thing about cookies, is possibly the dough. Which means these Texas sized cookies that remain soft and gooey in the center even when baked are my favorite thing ever! These cookies check all the boxes!
- Loaded with chocolate
- Thick!
- Chewy
- Buttery
- Soft and gooey
Ingredients Needed
- Flour: This recipe is written with all purpose flour, you can substitute with a gluten free 1:1 if needed.
- Light Brown Sugar: Using more light brown sugar than white helps these cookies to keep their thickness during baking, the light brown sugar creates a thicker, softer, and chewier cookie than using mostly white sugar.
- Baking powder & Baking soda: We are using both these leavening agents for our cookies. The baking powder will contribute to our cookies thickness.
Let’s make thick Chocolate Chip cookies
Find the complete recipe card below with measurements and full instructions.
- In a large mixing bowl add the butter and sugars. Using a hand or stand mixer, cream the butter and sugars until fluffy.
- Add in the large eggs and vanilla extract. Continue to mix until combined.
- Add in the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix until dough is just coming together. The dough might seem to be still crumbly at this point.
- Stir in the chocolate chips gently.
- Divide the dough into 12 or 6 equal portions. If making 12 cookies divide the dough into 81 gram portions. If making 6 large cookies divide the dough into 162 grams per cookie.
- Form the dough into balls, forming so they are tall and rounded.
- Place the formed dough on the baking sheet, then place the sheet in the refrigerator to chill for 30 minutes.
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
- Bake the cookies 15 minutes for large cookies and 10 minutes for small cookies.
- Check the internal temperature of the cookies to ensure they have reached a temperature of 160 degrees F.
Cooling
- Remove the cookies from the oven and allow to cool on the pan for at least 10 minutes.
- Cookies will continue to set in the center as they cool.
- If you break apart a cookie within moments of taking them out of the oven, they will be incredibly gooey in the center.
Important Tips
- The best dough will form if you use a hand mixer or stand mixer. This will allow you to throughly cream the butter and sugars.
- If using a mixer, the dough might seem a bit crumbly. Moist, but not completely sticking together in a solid mound. This is ok. As you work the dough it will come together. This cookie recipe does have more flour than an average cookie which helps with the thickness.
- Form the dough into tall shapes for baking, this will increase the thickness.
- Check the internal temperature. So you have no worries about if they were cooked all the way. These cookies are created to remain soft and will be gooey in the center while still warm. As long as the internal temperature reaches 160 degrees F in the center, the cookies are perfectly safe for eating.
Cookie Size
These cookies can be made to be the size of average cookies, just exceptionally thick. OR you can make extra large, Texas-sized, cookies. Think Levain bakery big. They will take up your entire hand when you hold them. Instructions for making both sizes are included in the recipe card below.
More Cookie Recipes
- Brown Butter Toffee Pretzel Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Lemon Cookies
- Banana Split Cookies
- Cowboy Cookies
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Thick Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- ½ cup salted butter room temperature
- ¾ cup light brown sugar (150 grams)
- ¼ cup white sugar (50 grams)
- 2 large egg
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 2¼ cups all purpose flour (315 grams)
- 1½ teaspoon salt (9 grams)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda (6 grams)
- ½ teaspoon baking powder (2.5 grams)
- 2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips
Instructions
- Line a large baking sheet with a silicone baking mat and set it aside.
- In a large mixing bowl add the butter and sugars. Using a hand or stand mixer, cream the butter and sugars until fluffy.
- Add in the large eggs and vanilla extract. Continue to mix until combined.
- Add in the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix until dough is just coming together. The dough might seem to be still crumbly at this point.
- Stir in the chocolate chips gently.
- Divide the dough into 12 or 6 equal portions. If making 12 cookies divide the dough into 81 gram portions. If making 6 large cookies divide the dough into 162 grams per cookie.
- Form the dough into balls, forming so they are tall and rounded.
- Place the formed dough on the baking sheet, then place the sheet in the refrigerator to chill for 30 minutes.
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
- Bake the cookies 15 minutes for large cookies and 10 minutes for small cookies.
- Check the internal temperature of the cookies to ensure they have reached a temperature of 160 degrees F.
- Remove the cookies from the oven and allow to cool on the pan for at least 10 minutes.
- Cookies will continue to set in the center as they cool.
Video
Notes
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
Changes
This recipe has changed from its initial publication based on comments, questions, and concerns left by readers. The Original Recipe is a favorite to many and can be found on a PDF here.
So why make changes? I agreed with some comments in regards to a slight flour after-taste. To combat this I added more vanilla and salt. Plus switched to using salted butter for even more flavoring. Plus the adjustments to moisture and flour helped in this area.
In regards to some people saying the dough was crumbly, I added a bit more moisture. I didn’t want to use only part of an egg since I hate waste, so I added an extra egg, which made the cookies too flat. So I had to up the flour slightly to adjust for the increase of moisture from the egg.
And of course, this time around, we have metric measurements to help ensure more consistent results all around.
More Cookie Recipes
Recipe initially posted on May 23, 2018. Updated on March 6, 2020 and October 23, 2024. Original photo of recipe below!
Hi! What will happen if I add cornstarch? I don’t live in the US, what is considered all purpose flower?
How can we prevent them from getting hard? After a couple hours they lose all chewiness. Maybe adding an egg?
Anna, I’ve made this recipe maybe 5 times and have never had them get hard. (To be fair, 6 cookies don’t last all that long, but they have lasted a couple days and always retained perfect texture.) Try following the recipe and tips when mixing and forming the dough, and be sure to refrigerate! Should come out perfectly.
I am really, really glad I did not actually follow the recipe (just some of it). I assume the writer lives in a climate where ‘room temperature butter’ begins to lose its stability and form pockets of melting (Texas) however maintain its outer walls. I live in a COLD climate (Manitoba) where room temperature butter keeps its cohesive shape and is merely ‘soft enough to work’. This different in butter softness causes extreme changes in a cookie result, fortunately something I knew to adapt. If you are in such a climate where your butter will now actually accept your finger pressing into it but no pockets will form of melt, use my advice or your dough will be too powdery to form up. Also note that even decreasing flour, these cookies will not ‘flatten out’, so make them the final height you desire them to stay when you bake, not ‘balls’ as you would do with many other recipes.
I doubled the recipe, and put in 2 cups of flour, which was slightly too little, and then added 1 more cup, which was too much, and resulted in a thick floury base that would not absorb into the dough without doing exactly what the recipe chides against doing: overmixing it. So, I lost about a half an inch coating the bottom of the bowl, I figure around a quarter of a cup too much.
Overmixing is a genuine concern the writer is correct to recommend you avoid as it forms strands of gluten, making the cookie tougher and less fluffy. At base proportions this would be 1.5 cups of flour resulting in too much, so I would recommend 1 and a quarter cups of flour if you don’t double the recipe like I did, or 2 and a half cups if you do. Or, microwave your butter so that it’s just beginning to lose some cohesion but still has most of its square shape if you want to get the exact results of what a Texan room temperature would give you. This can usually be achieved by microwaving for 45-60 seconds on a low temperature. I used my natural room temperature butter, which is the correct choice if you want a THICK chocolate chip cookie that will not lose its shape during baking (a fully melted butter cookie with less flour will ‘spread out’, getting the butter to a precise melt is VITAL!). My resultant cookie was large, thick, chewy, and fluffy instead of falling apart at the touch as it would have if I had followed the proportions instead of trusting my knowledge of cooking in my climate. For the record: my dough looked like her final result at 2 cups of flour in the doubled recipe, so, exactly half. As only three ‘liquids’ enter the cookie (butter, egg, vanilla) the only variability is the butter’s softness, the amount of vanilla, or the size of the eggs, yet if I had used the original measurements I would have powder and needed to adapt by adding in a liquid, such as milk or a third egg.
Note that the writer also insists in the comments that you cannot alter the sugar amounts, a lie, baking is not the precious precision art that some would have you believe unless you mean to reproduce for sale. You can get a perfectly fine chocolate chip cookie by altering the sugar, it just won’t be the EXACT vision of this writer’s cookie. I have never found a cookie recipe that couldn’t take a sugar decrease and bake up tastily. Thus, as I always do when I bake, I decreased the brown sugar to 1 cup (half a cup if you don’t double it) and left the white sugar as it was (using half a cup). I also made smaller cookies, MUCH smaller. I made 16 out of half of my dough and put the other half in the fridge to test the flavor melding overnight concept. They are still quite sweet, delicious, and form the style of chocolate chip cookie I wanted… and ring in more like 150 calories per cookie. Whew. They’ll still be quite large and puffy as long as you didn’t melt your butter or under-add flour, you have to balance that flour ratio to match the softness of your butter and get it just to the point where it’s almost ‘too stiff’ that you can’t really roll out cookies, just squeeze a bit in your hand and set them on the pan.
They will appear ‘underbaked’ but trust me, they need that time on the hot pan to cook and cool all at the same time to get to that perfectly chewy centre. The greater proportion of brown sugar to white sugar and large amount of flour is vital to that result, if you do fiddle with the sugar amounts make sure that there’s always more brown sugar because it melts differently. I do like my cookies result and I will do this again, but with my changes. Oh yeah, I added more vanilla (you can always add more vanilla) and a tiny bit more salt, which I felt I could have comfortably doubled and may do in my next version if I use unsalted butter again (decrease if it’s salted butter). I also used chocolate chips and a few salted caramel chips I had lying around, and made sure to press some chips on top before baking for ‘perfection’. The pecans are “optional”, but not to me! I put pecans in, very nice addition, you can use any nut really, walnuts or almonds are nice too, but I had pecans so I used as advised and no regrets, I really enjoyed that woody pop of flavor.
Apart from my critiques, which I believe are solely due to a temperature difference of around 5 ambient degrees and also likely humidity/pressure, this is the bones of the TYPE of chocolate chip cookie I like most… thick, huge, and chewy, not thin and crispy and spread out over the parchment paper. The general advice will get you to that resultant form-held cookie. I have saved it for future use with notes. About to enjoy one of them now!
(note on chips: I used Decadent PC brand chips, I feel these are the optimal chocolate chip for Canadians as they are a little on the large side and hold their shape well, but any will do, including even chopping chunks of your favorite chocolate bar! or use a flavored chip like a peanut butter chip! 😀 This cookie would also be EXCELLENT with chocolate candies like M&Ms or the Canadian Smarties but not the USA kind. If I do it again I might use peanut butter chips and put a peanut butter thumbprint in the middle or be really extravagant and put a Reese’s cup quarter into the middle!)
I made this recipe and I trusted my instincts and used a little more than half of the flour (the equal of 1.25 cups). I assume you like me, live in a COLD climate where room temperature butter does acquire malleability but not pockets of melt. The writer lives in Texas. Room temperature butter will begin to melt inside and retain solidity outside. This is all the difference, and means it’s wayyyyyy too much flour if you make these cookies in the north. Trust your heart. Make this recipe with half flour and a little less sugar, a lot more vanilla, and several more chocolate chips and you’ll love it. Your experience is exactly what I feared if I trusted the writer’s proportions and I see I would have been right.
I doctored these to suit my food sensitivities (gluten-free flour, soy-free margarine, and egg whites). The dough didn’t come out crumbly, it was smooth like regular cookie dough I’ve made, so I used an ice cream scoop, but they came out perfect. These are my idea of the perfect chocolate chip cookie, soft but chewy. Yum. Thanks so much! Definitely a keeper!
Joann, what kind/brand of flour have you found to work best?
Joanne, what kind/brand of flour have you found to work best?
these smacked
I am so bummed. I followed recipe to the “t” and just cut into one after baking for 18 minutes, letting cool for 5 and it’s completely raw inside. Very disappointed.
These cookies do need the time to cool after baking and as time goes by they will “set” more. They aren’t underbaked, they’re perfectly safe to eat, they are gooey in the center though!
I am always unsuccessful at making a decent chocolate chip cookie and regularly try new recipes in my ongoing search for “the one!” This is it, made for the first this evening on the spur of the moment and they are absolutely delicious just the way they are. Will most definitely be making these again……and again……and again. Thanks for sharing this great recipe.
I would like to make these cookies. However, some in the family are diabetic. The amounts of dark-white sugar look like these will be super sweet. Can you please provide a measurement that will work still with this recipe. But not be so sweet. I’m looking for a soft sweet taste that will blend with the sugar from the semi-sweet chocolates. Please advice. Thankyou 🤗.
Hi Sylvia, unfortunately this recipe is created using this particular amount of sugar. Changing the amount will affect how the cookies bake. If you are needing a diabetic friendly recipe you should look into a Low Carb (Keto) Chocolate Chip cookie recipe.
Sylvia, you can generally get away with halving the sugar content of any baked goods and receive a similar result before it begins to lose flavor. I decreased the brown sugar to 1 cup instead of 1.5 cups in my doubled recipe, and used the same amount of white sugar and my cookies were excellent. You could decrease the flour to 1 and a quarter cups and the brown sugar to half a cup and the white sugar to a third of a cup. This is not a precision science as the writer would erroneously have you believe. You can also substitute half of the flour for oatmeal and make it healthier, and use dark chocolate chunks instead of chocolate chips with a high sugar content.
Hi, I would like to know if someone can help me by telling me this recipee in grams . I have been trying to find the conversation from cups to grams but seems to be different everywhere.
I appreciate your help in advance.
Thanks