Chocolate Chip Sprinkle Cookies

The big Concordia paper landed this week — fifteen pages on assistive technology integration, due Friday by midnight. I wrote the first eight pages Monday and Tuesday in a kind of productive fugue, the good kind where the sentences come out in order and you don't hate them. The last seven I wrote Thursday evening after the kids were down, with a cup of tea I kept forgetting and a bowl of popcorn because I needed something to do with my hands. I submitted it at 11:52 PM and sat at the kitchen table for a minute listening to the apartment settle around me, the radiator clanking, the street quiet. Ryan was at the firehouse. The kids were asleep. The cursor blinked.

Wednesday was the school Christmas party — room moms, sugar cookies, the chaos of twenty-eight kids hyped on frosting at two in the afternoon. My room had a small version: I'd made a batch of Babcia Rose's gingerbread cookies with the twins Sunday, the ones with molasses and cloves, and brought them in. They weren't beautiful — Owen had decorated several with approximately one full tablespoon of sprinkles each — but Marcus declared them "better than regular cookies." I put one in a napkin in my bag and ate it on the train home and it tasted exactly like her kitchen on Carpenter Street in Oak Lawn, the one she sold years ago.

Mom called earlier than usual Thursday — six fifty-five — which means she was worried about something specific. "Dziadek Wally had a bad night." Not serious, she said, just confused, couldn't settle. She'd sat with him until two AM. I heard the tiredness in her voice and felt the helplessness of being twenty minutes away and not being there. "I'll come Saturday," I said. She said it wasn't necessary. I went Saturday anyway.

Saturday at my parents': Wally was better, quieter but better. My dad had made a pot of mushroom barley soup — from a box but finished with actual mushrooms, which is a Kowalczyk compromise I've learned to respect. We ate at the kitchen table and talked about nothing important: road construction on Cicero, the White Sox, whether the Jewel on 95th would stay open. Wally ate half a bowl. On the way home I stopped at Aldi and bought dried porcini mushrooms. I want to get his soup right while I still can ask him questions about it.

Owen’s one-tablespoon-of-sprinkles decorating philosophy has been living rent-free in my head since the school party, and honestly I think he’s right — some baked goods just want to be buried. The gingerbread is Babcia Rose’s and I’ll keep making those, but these chocolate chip sprinkle cookies are something the twins can own entirely: mix, scoop, bury in sprinkles, done. After the week we had — the paper, the early phone call, the drive to my parents’ — I needed one thing in the kitchen that was just fun, no questions about getting it right.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 11 min | Total Time: 26 min | Servings: 36 cookies

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup rainbow sprinkles, plus more for topping

Instructions

Preheat. Heat oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats.
Whisk dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugars. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter with both sugars on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2–3 minutes.
Add eggs and vanilla. Beat in eggs one at a time, then add vanilla extract and mix until fully combined.
Combine. Reduce mixer to low and gradually add the flour mixture, mixing just until no dry streaks remain. Do not overmix.
Fold in mix-ins. Using a spatula or wooden spoon, fold in the chocolate chips and 1/2 cup sprinkles.
Scoop and top. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto prepared baking sheets, spacing about 2 inches apart. Press a generous pinch of additional sprinkles onto the top of each dough ball — the more the better, as Owen would say.
Bake. Bake for 9–11 minutes, until the edges are just set and the centers still look slightly underdone. They will firm up as they cool.
Cool. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chocolate Chip Sprinkle Cookies — Owen’s Heavy-Handed Holiday Tradition