Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Mrs. Dooley’s Cookies. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.  This recipe was submitted by reader Alexandra.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was submitted by reader Alexandra, who said:

My mom used to make these cookies all the time when I was a kid, and now I make them whenever I feel the need for something other than chocolate chip cookies. I made a couple of batches when super-pregnant this past fall, ate one (batch, that is, not cookie) and took the other to the hospital to give to the staff. I find that the cookies are best after a day or two of “ripening.” They also freeze pretty well.

My mom got the recipe from a college friend who got it from her mother (the “Mrs. Dooley” of the recipe name). My guess is that it may have originally been an Eagle Brand recipe, but I couldn’t find it on their page, so who knows.

Also — no eggs! You can eat all the dough you want!

I’m going to add here that I Googled to the best of my abilities and didn’t find this recipe anywhere, not on the Eagle Brand site, not anywhere on the entire internet. We’re sticklers for giving credit where credit is due, so if you happen to know where the recipe originally came from, let us know. Otherwise, we’re declaring Mrs. Dooley the genius behind this.

Your ingredients:

Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk (honestly, the brand doesn’t matter), chocolate chips, butter, vanilla, flour.

First, you’ve gotta melt your chocolate chips and butter together. I do have a double boiler, but if you don’t, then use a bowl (not a plastic one, dummy) over a pot of water. Alexandra says that her mother uses the microwave, 30 seconds at a time, at medium or medium-high power. That sounds like something I’d completely fuck up, so I opted to use my double boiler.

This step takes FOREVER, so I wandered through the house and snuggled sleeping kittens and occasionally returned to the kitchen to give the chocolate chips and butter a stir.

“Tired of your snuggling shit, lady.”

Then there are a few steps I completely didn’t take pictures of. Once the chocolate chips and butter are melted together, you remove it from the heat. I put it in a big bowl, dumped the sweetened, condensed milk in, and stirred it all together really well. AND THEN added the flour and vanilla, alternating. Basically I added half the flour, mixed it well, then half the vanilla, mixed it well, the rest of the flour, mixed it well, and the last of the vanilla. I did this all by hand, but I think a mixer would have been okay.

Then it’s got to sit for 15 minutes to let the dough “toughen.”

Grease your cookie sheets OR (this is what I did) line them with parchment paper. Parchment paper is THE BOMB, and makes cleanup so so easy. I always have a ton of the precut sheets on hand.

Drop dough by heaping tablespoons onto your cookie sheet. I used my beloved cookie scoop.

They don’t spread much at all. This is what they look like when they’re done.

Fred happened to arrive home from work just as I pulled the last pan of cookies from the oven. I opened my mouth to tell him that we were going to let them “age” for a couple of days, but before I could he ate one, declared it “really good” and then ate another. I gave one a try, and he was right – it was good! They’re fudgy and chewy and pretty small, so you can eat 75 of them without feeling guilty (ha, as if I ever feel guilty about eating FOOD).

This recipe makes a lot of cookies (I got 5 1/2 dozen, and I was generous with shoving uncooked dough in my face as I was making the cookies), so we were able to check them the next day and then the day after that. They start out good and they only improve with age. We still had so many left after two days that I put the rest in the freezer.

I do think that a sprinkle of sea salt across the top (do I sound all pretentious like Amanda? I hope not!) or a sprinkle of toasted pecans might be a nice addition. I’m definitely adding this recipe to the recipe box and will be making them again. A++, thanks for submitting, Alexandra!

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Nance’s Take:

My week was horrific (Maddy lost her battle with renal failure) and it never got any better by the time I had to make these cookies.  My mother had surgery, Trey’s car blew a head-gasket, our riding lawn mower shit the bed, Rick had to go out of town for work, and we found out that the powder room toilet had been leaking. Leaking so bad that it went through the carpeting and soaked the wooden sub-floor beneath it.

I had been convinced that Felina was stealth-peeing on my mother’s bedroom carpeting (right outside the powder room).  You don’t even want to know how many times I scrubbed that carpet, bitching the entire time about that googley-eyed ugly dog, while the real culprit was silently destroying my life not 3 feet away.

So yeah.  It was the week from hell and all I have to show for it is a broke down Buick in the driveway and a toilet sitting on my back porch.  It’s just a matter of time until I’m the star of a reality show called My White Trash Life.  Be jealous.

You can probably figure out from reading the above that I was in absolutely no mood to bake fucking cookies, right?  But I couldn’t let Robyn down so I busted out my fancy pans and went to work. This is my double boiler.  I have never bothered to buy a real double boiler because this bowl/pan combo has always worked out for me.    

Well, it works out for me until I get a steam burn when I’m trying to stir something.   Maybe I should just break down and buy a damn double boiler.  That’s a good name for a band.  The Damn Double Boilers.  Okay, maybe it’s not a good name for a band.  How about The Scalded Skins?  Somebody trademark that shit.

You’re welcome.

I pulled this out of the refrigerator.  Can you even imagine what was going on with this butter that it is twist-wrapped on both ends?  Who twist-wraps butter?  And why would you be using both ends of a butter stick?  Someone in my family is a weirdo.  And no, it’s not me (shut-up).

This bag of Hershey’s chocolate chips had 2 cups in it and we need 3 cups for the recipe.  Ugh, math.

I figured I would use 1 cup of these mini morsels that I had in my freezer for some reason. I honestly think they’re from the time we made some kind of diet cannoli/graham cracker frozen treat. Yes, I know I can search the site.  But eh, too lazy.  Just know that I’m assuming DCEP is the reason I have mini morsels in my freezer because I would never buy them on my own.

This is what happens when you try and balance chocolate chips on Sadie’s head and the damn cat gets directly in her face.

Too bad we don’t have Scratch ‘N Sniff because this melted chocolate smelled fabulous.

Action shot! I had already stirred the hell out of the melted chocolate and sweetened condensed milk. Adding the flour just meant lots more stirring. If you have old lady hands like me, it’s a good idea to have someone around to help you out. Between arthritis and carpal tunnel I was ready for a heating pad by the time I was done with this recipe. No lie.

This is what it looked like after I let it sit for 15 minutes like the recipe said to do.  You can tell I was done with all the stirring just by looking at the sides of the bowl. Normally I would have had a spatula out and made sure the sides were scraped clean. I was so over it by the time I was done stirring that I had, as they say on the Internet, no more shits to give.

I used parchment paper and dropped the dough on it with tablespoons. Julie was unimpressed with the outcome.

When I was growing up there was no way in hell I would have gotten away with sniffing my food.  That was a serious rule at our house.  No sniffing your food and absolutely no licking your butter knife!

I went back and rolled the dough into balls and then flattened them slightly with my fingers. As you can see, it made for a much prettier cookie.

The cookies ended up tasting great!  Imagine a cookie with a brownie flavor and texture because that’s exactly what these were like.  They were even better the next day.  After all my bitching it turned out that these are definitely a keeper!