I love chewy cookies.
I thought it would help to do a cookie comparison to find the best chocolate chip cookie for your buck. Sparked by a friend who sent me cookies from someplace new (Iamnotsponsoredhor), I bought some of my usual chocolate chip cookies to make a big cookie comparison. Here’s the list of chocolate chip cookie contenders:
- Subwayyyyy
- Starbucks
- 12 Cupcakes
- Ben’s Cookies
- Folks and Stories
Let’s start with their Dimensions.
12 Cupcakes has the biggest chocolate chip cookie of the lot, with Folks & Stories has the teeniest at 7.6cm (about the length of a namecard)! However, this wouldn’t be complete without thickness:
As suspected, Folks & Stories makes up for its smaller diameter by having the thickest chocolate chip cookie of the lot!
Note: Given their list of unconventional cookie flavours, Folks & Stories doesn’t seem to have a “Chocolate Chip Cookie” per se. I picked their Milk & Dark Chocolate cookie (which they name “N°1 SALT OF THE EARTH”) for this comparison.
Weight (Actually Mass)
- Subwayyyyy – 46g
- Starbucks – 101g
- 12 Cupcakes – 116g
- Ben’s Cookies – 76g
- Folks and Stories – 53g
As expected, the Subway cookies are lightest of the lot, but it’s more than justified by their price!
Chocolate Chip Cookie Comparison Table
I compiled the stats in this table to find the densest cookie of them all and the worthiest cookie of them all.
Cheapest Individual Chocolate Chip Cookie: Subway (for both bulk and non-bulk pricing!)
Cheapest Chocolate Chip Cookie by mass per dollar: 12 Cupcakes (also for all pricing!)
Biggest Chocolate Chip Cookie by Volume: 12 Cupcakes
Heaviest Chocolate Chip Cookie: 12 Cupcakes
Densest Chocolate Chip Cookie: Ben’s Cookies
I was surprised to find that 12 Cupcakes had the cheapest chocolate chip cookies per gram, even though I consider them on the pricey side. I would say that if you don’t need so much bulk in one cookie, and just enjoy cookies, I’d get the three cookies from Subway for $3.50 and munch away (tip: they’re cheaper in universities at student price!)
Why Chocolate Chip Cookies?
There are so many flavours out there, but I feel that the classic chocolate chip cookie is the best representation of cookie dough and toppings coming together without distracting each other too much. For instance, double-chocolate cookies are more like a judgement of chocolate than anything else, and peanut butter cookies are overwhelmed by the pure taste of peanut butter. Chocolate chip cookies have little bursts of chocolate, but just enough that the dough itself can shine. I love em.
What about taste?
I wanted to use objective data for this cookie comparison! Everyone has their own preference for what the best part of a cookie’s taste is. For me, I’m particularly a fan of dense bites and complex flavours. I gotta say, the Starbucks chocolate chip cookie has my favourite bite density of them all, while I would pick the Folks & Stories chocolate chip cookie for flavour – I think it’s the browned butter that gives it an edge!
Homemade?
Of course the cheapest way of getting your chocolate chip cookie fix, if you weigh out all the ingredients and prices and divide them out per cookie, is baking yourself a batch at home. I’m a big fan of this article by J. Kenji López-Alt, where he breaks down all the effects of each ingredient on the outcome of a great chocolate chip cookie. I think I’ll share my recipe in another post.
Hope you found this useful! Comment to suggest any other comparisons you’d like to see!
Helpful Information From a Singaporean 
Interesting choices for comparison – out of curiosity, any reason for measuring 12 Cupcakes and Ben’s Cookies but not Famous Amos? Ditto, why include Starbucks but not Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Jewel, Cedele, da Paolo etc?
Please do a Part 2 and 3 of this! We want more comparisons on delicious choc chip cookies!
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Thanks for the comment, I love feedback :]
I excluded Famous (J)amos because their crunchy/crispy cookie differs quite greatly from the dense/chewy ones in the post. I think they -do- have a soft cookie, albeit less popular… sounds like a good idea to include in that part 2 post you mentioned 🙂 I hope this post covers the more common cookies in Singapore though, always happy to collect more data for the sheets 🙂
(sidenote: coffee bean’s cookies are the brittle kind too! maybe comparing the brittle ones would be for post 3. but I love dense chewy cookies la.)
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Honestly, nothing beats homemade. If you want to get your hands dirty, here’s a recipe (written from another lifetime, before I balik kampong to Singapore, and believed referring to myself in third person was acceptable).
https://thetaoofourlartdevivre.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/choc-chip-cookie-reloaded/
P.S – for the really dense, chewy cookie texture you alluded to, change the 115g butter to 86g canola/olive oil plus 19g water (or 93ml oil to 19ml water). Oil and sugar will not cream the way sugar and butter does, but it will produce cookies that are slightly crisp on the outside, while soft and chewy on the inside.
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Just collected a new bag of cookies for Part 2, haha. Waiting for the sun to come out in my areas for new photos. Unfortunately Coffee Bean doesn’t have chocolate chip – from the branches I’ve visited, looks like just doublechoc and macademia!
The part 2 list will have:
-Famous Amos
-Nasty Cookie (The funan one)
-Jewel
-Marks & Spence
-Carl’s Jr (yup they have)
Just a heads up haha. Cheers
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Splendid. Can’t wait for Part 2. Happy taste-testing.
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