Teacher Appreciation Cookies

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week at my daughter’s school. Monday, everyone brought flowers for the teachers to put together into a flower arrangement, so we picked out some flowers over the weekend for Andrea to bring in. Today, students were asked to bring in a snack or sweet treat for their teachers. I talked to Andrea and she wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for her teachers. I suggested we put them in some Ball jars. We went to made a double batch of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (BEST-EVER Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies). They really are the best-ever chocolate chip cookies, and definitely chewy, which I love.

I bought a cookie scoop to use for the first time ever, and I *loved* it. I will never go back to scooping cookie dough with a spoon. The scoop I bought is slightly larger than the standard size I think – it holds about 1 1/2 tablespoons. It was sold as a “small” scoop at my grocery store, but from what I can tell, the standard size for a cookie scoop is 1 tablespoon. As a result, my cookies were a little bigger than the original recipe, but perfectly round and pretty consistent in size between the cookies. I overfilled the scoop in the first couple of batches, so those cookies were a bit bigger, but I found out they were slightly too big to fit even in the wide-mouth Ball jars I bought. I was able to fix that by just barely filling the cookie scoop for the remainder of the batches, and those cookies fit just fine in the jars.

I used two different types of chocolate chips – Ghirardelli bittersweet chips and Nestle milk chocolate chips. I’ve used Nestle semi-sweet before, but I thought they were too sweet for the recipe, so I was curious how the other types would taste. I definitely preferred the taste of bittersweet chocolate chips that the recipe calls for, even though I’m not normally a fan of bittersweet chocolate, it seemed to match the cookie best. The only downside was that the Ghirardelli chips were a little wider and flatter than the Nestle chips, so the cookies with the Nestle chips turned out a little prettier with beautiful lumps from the chocolate chips.

Here are picture of a few of the cookies so you can see how beautiful they were and the difference made by the two different shaped chocolate chips. (The two lumpier ones in the front are the Nestle ones, and the two in the back are the Ghirardelli ones.)

For the jars, I traced the flat metal lid on white cardstock, and then had Andrea draw a picture for each of her teachers and write her name on each one. Then I cut them out and glued them on to the lids. (TIP: I found I needed to cut out a smaller circle of cardboard to glue between the lid and the cardstock to fill the gap from the raised edge on the lid.) I made little labels for the each jar that had the teacher’s name and said, “Thanks for making me one smart ‘cookie’!” I designed the labels in Microsoft Word, printed them on cardstock, and then cut out and hole punched the tags. Then I tied the tags on with some cute ribbon I picked up in the Target Dollar Spot a while back.

And here’s the final result! Andrea was so excited to bring them in to school this morning.

I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!
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