Mayonnaise Chocolate Cookies

I don't think I've made the Tollhouse recipe for chocolate chip cookies as written in decades. Really. It's a good jumping off point, and can be found on the back of any Nestle morsels package:

2 1/4 Cup flour
1 C (2 Sticks) of butter
3/4 C brown sugar
3/4 C white sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 C chocolate morsels
1 C chopped nuts

Which is too much sugar and too much salt, even when using unsalted butter. Bleh. It's a recipe to cover up the inferior quality of Nestle chocolate chips. Like all too-many-tools recipes, it asks you to cream the butter with a mixer, yada yada. Too many bowls.

In its most primitive state, this is a One Bowl recipe that can be made with a spoon or hard spatula, half the sugar, and allowed to wild forage for other goodies in your pantry.

Today I almost stuck to the recipe. I was intending to make it to spec. Nevertheless, as I was setting out the ingredients, I noticed the cocoa powder. As I was getting out the beater I found myself thinking about how the mayonnaise in mayo chocolate cake is, because of the vinegar, supposed to bring out the chocolate. (I was recently reading mayo cake recipes because I have a store brand -- Kroger -- mayonnaise that is just awful. It is not, as intended, putting me off mayo so much as making me want the good stuff.)

You might guess what happened next. No? I substituted half the butter, one stick, for 1/2 C of mayo. I reduced the eggs to 1. I added 1/2 C of cocoa. I reduced the sugar to 1/2 C white + 3/4 C brown sugar. I reduced the salt to 1/2 tsp, but I should have left it out altogether because my butter and mayo both had salt. I forgot about the salt in the mayonnaise.

The chocolate, chocolate chip, pecan and white chip cookies came out well. They were slightly drier than ideal; that can be fixed by reducing the flour by that 1/4 C, making the dry 2 C flour + 1/2 cocoa. The dough was very nice, fluffy, not too sticky but with good cohesiveness. The slightly over-salted flavor of the raw dough baked out so it was fine in cookie form. Warm from the oven, they had a brownie-like flavor but were cookie-firm. Cooled, they are an almost perfect cookie. The dryness promotes enjoyment with a glass of milk.

Mayonnaise for the win -- who knew?