Broiler Cookies

• servings: 6 cookies
• active time: 15 minutes
• total time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

1 stick unsalted butter

1 egg

1 teaspoon salt

1-2 teaspoons vanilla extract

½ teaspoon baking soda

1 ⅔ cups all-purpose flour

Chocolate chips or other mix-ins

Directions

Get the oven heating to 375ºF/190ºC, convection if you have it.

Melt the butter. Mix in the sugar until smooth. Mix in the egg until very smooth. Mix in the salt (FYI, some people might not like their cookies as salty as I do), vanilla, baking soda, flour and chips. The dough should be a little sticky — you can chill it for a few minutes to make it easier to shape.

Divide the dough into six portions and roll each into something like a golf ball. Space them evenly on a baking sheet — no parchment paper, no grease. Flatten each ball into something like a hockey puck and tidy up the circular shape.

Turn the oven off and turn the broiler on maximum. Give it a minute or two to heat up, then put in the cookies near the top. Let the broiler brown the tops of the cookies until golden — this should only take a minute, so don't walk away or they'll burn. If you're doing multiple pans of cookies, brown them each one at a time.

Turn the broiler off and the oven back on to 375ºF/190ºC. Give the broiler a couple minutes to cool down, then return the cookies to the oven. Bake until they spread and look done to you — mine take about eight minutes as this stage, but they'll take longer if you don't have a convection fan. I like the texture when they look a hair underbaked.

Let the cookies cool and solidify before scraping them off the baking sheet.