When Autumn Moultrie was growing up in Ontario, Calif., her mother, Sherrie, would take Autumn to Subway for a sandwich and a cookie.
The trips were particularly special to Autumn, because she really liked those cookies, and her mother was often out working. One of Sherrie’s jobs was driving a school bus. In quiet times, Autumn would get to ride along, just the two of them.
Recipe: White Chocolate Raspberry Cookies
Baking cookies was another thing they did, just the two of them. Sherrie tweaked the recipe with each bake, inching closer and closer to her ideal texture but never quite reaching it. Autumn remembers watching her mother grow frustrated whenever the cookies didn’t come out as reliably chewy as the ones from the fast-food chains.
Now in her 30s, Autumn, who runs Dolly’s Coffee Shop in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, is especially picky about cookies. They should be “crispy on the outside but really, really soft and gooey in the center,” she says. She thinks her mother’s use of shortening may have been the problem: Shortening doesn’t contain water the way butter does, and a good cookie needs the right amount of moisture. At Dolly’s, Autumn cooks the butter until it’s blondish brown, evaporating some of its water content, “to give you that really cool crunchy, chewy edge,” she says — her dream texture. To my mind, Autumn’s chocolate-chip cookie at Dolly’s is one of the dreamiest in New York City, probably the best. (It’s no wonder that Dolly’s, run with her business partner, Brian Villanueva, usually has a line out the door.) But it was her white-chocolate-and-raspberry cookie that madeleined me to my childhood like Proust.
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