Fractional Factorial Design

If there's one thing we love here at CederBaby it's chocolate chip cookies. In fact, we are on a quest for the *perfect* chocolate chip cookie. We have always been fans of the traditional Toll House Cookie recipe. However, my favorite magazine,"Cook's Illustrated", claims to have improved the recipe and to have taste-tested the perfect chocolate chip. We decided to run our own tests.


Step 1 was to do a blind taste-test of 6 different chocolate chips. Well, you gotta do what you gotta do. So, Ella, Rob, and I tested lots of chocolate chips and our top two are Hershey's Chocolate Chips and Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chips. We had a slight preference for the Hershey's.

Here's a video of Ella and her chocolate chips. She didn't care which brand was which, she only cared about getting, "lots and lots" of chips. (lots and lots is her new favorite phrase. She wants lots and lots of everything.)

Step 2 was testing the traditional recipe up against the updated version. Of course, this is not as easy as it sounds. To ensure that we tried both recipes with both chips Rob set us up a Fractional Factorial Design Cookie experiment. Basically, that means we cooked the two batches of dough and divided them in half. Two of those batches got Hershey Chips and two got Nestle Chips.

Here's a video of Ella mixing up the dough.

We marked the cookie sheets to separate the four batches: Traditional Recipe & Toll House Chips; Traditional Recipe & Hershey Chips; Updated Recipe & Toll House Chips; Updated Recipe & Hershey Chips.

(yes, we take cookies very seriously at our house; did I mention it rained all morning and we needed something to keep ourselves entertained)

The Results:

We both strongly preferred the updated recipe because of its rich, toffee like flavor but we couldn't tell the difference between the chips in the baked cookies.

Don't worry, our cookie experimenting days are not over. Next step, is to test the recipes with a dark chocolate chip, which we didn't like in the taste testing but which may work well in the rich new dough.

We'll keep you posted!