Sweet Success!

A follow-up from my previous post: I made cookies... and they were awesome! I made White Chocolate Macademia Nut Cranberry Cookies and they were everything cookies should be: sweet, soft, slight crisp on the bottom and around the edges, chewy and gooey on the inside.... in a word, perfection.

This is not a moment of bragging, people, but REJOICING!! I can't express enough how much of a victory this is for me! My first ever GOOD cookies. Something I never thought myself capable of. Days later, and I'm still smiling about this accomplishment. Ahhhh... nothin' like the sweet taste of success. Pun. In. Tended.

Many thanks for the advice I was given! These are the tips I used:
- All the ingredients brought to room temp before making the dough
- Dough chilled in the fridge while the oven pre-heats
- Cookies baked on a silicone mat
- Under-baked by a minute or so
- Left on cookie sheet for a few minutes to "finish" before transferring to a cooling rack
- Most importantly, lots and lots of love added at every step of the process! :)

Oh. And I also finally learned (and implemented) what all these cookie recipes mean by "Cream butter and sugar together." Don't ask what I'd been doing in the past. SO. Embarrassing. Needless to say, I had never done it correctly until this batch! I think it made a world of difference.

Here are the pics of the gloriousness:

Yummy.

I was so proud :)

I feel like I can taste them all over again just staring at the sugary goodness.

Cookie Baking Tips?

Dearest Readers!

I come to you tonight humbly seeking advice! As I've said many a time before on ye olde blog, my cooking skills vastly outpace my baking skills. Lately I've been venturing more and more into uncharted kitchen territory, successfully baking a pumpkin pie and a reallllly yummy bread (recipe post to come! want to try it once more to make sure it's legit).

Progress.

However. My fiercest oven enemy is that sweet concoction of flour, sugar, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff - cookies. I destroy cookies. Betty Crocker cries in her grave whenever she hears me utter the fateful phrase "I'm gonna try to make some cookies today." I'm like the Anti-Crocker. Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad, buuuut then again, it's pretty bad. For some reason or another, I can NEVER get my cookies to come out just right! I even mess up the store-bought dough cookies... you know, the ones that are supposed to be fool proof? Yea, apparently they're not Anti-Crocker proof.

Sometimes my cookies taste okay, but they're always too hard. And sometimes they taste BAD and are too hard! And sometimes, they're not hard which would mean yay! but it's not yay! because instead, they are cake. Little cake circles. And they usually taste awkward because people's taste buds can't make sense of something shaped like a cookie being so spongy and weird.

Guys, all I want is to produce a batch of yummy, soft cookies. It can't be that difficult! I swear, seven year old girls yield better cookies results from their easy-bake ovens. Maybe I should just get one of those... make my life a little bit easier... and by "those" I mean hire a seven year old girl to bake me some quick choco-chip miracles from her $25 Hasbro baking machine.

No! I refuse to admit defeat! I need to make some cookies for a party on Saturday and for once I'd like my plate of cookies to NOT be left sitting on the table, still piled high with inferior, ignored cookies that by now have started to develop some serious self-esteem issues which only add to their likelihood of being avoided by each new person that looks upon their sorry, pitiable cookie faces.

So! Any cookie tips? How do I make yummy, soft, moist, NOT cake-like, melt-in-your-mouth, scrumptious, Crocker-worthy cookies?? I've got a few recipes, but I'm open to recipe ideas as well!
Thank you so much for any advice you can give me! :)