What started out as an unusual idea to raise money for the Folk Artists Foundation Museum turned into a Guinness Book of World Records achievement. The Immaculate Baking Company of Flat Rock, North Carolina, baked the world’s largest chocolate chip cookie on May 17, 2003. It weighed 40,000 pounds and was 101 feet in diameter.
(Michelle_Raponi/pixabay)
The Oven
It took Immaculate Baking six months of experimenting to plan how to bake a cookie so huge. The previous record-holder, Cookie Time in New Zealand, had produced an 81-foot diameter cookie. With no oven large enough in existence to bake a 100-foot diameter cookie, the ambitious team at Immaculate Baking enlisted help from a nearby ceramics factory. The result was an outside oven in the field next to their factory, using common, inexpensive materials.
Immaculate Baking used a comparatively tiny 10-foot test oven to calculate how to heat the space they would need to bake their monster cookie. The outdoor oven would be covered with a layer of polyester film—the material used to make helium balloons—to trap the heat. Twenty space heaters turned to maximum temperature would be used to bring the pan to 350 degrees.
The Pan
A massive cookie also required a gargantuan pan. Immaculate Baking constructed the pan from a layer of gravel and pearlite—the white granules in potting soil—and aluminum foil.
The Recipe
In addition to the enormous pan and oven, Immaculate Baking needed a way to produce enough cookie dough for their record-breaking project. They came up with a recipe called Chocobilly, which would bake faster than standard cookie dough. The batches of Chocobilly had to be mixed, spread in 1-foot square boxes to half-inch thickness, and stored in freezers until baking day. Each batch weighed 80 pounds.
The Big Baking Day
The company mixed, spread, and froze 500 batches of cookie dough until they had reached their goal of 40,000 pounds. On baking day, they began laying out the half-inch thick sections of cookie dough like pavers. They filled the pan, covered it all with the polyester film, and turned on the space heaters before dawn. Despite rain that day, Immaculate Baking Company was able to bake their enormous cookie in the outdoor oven. It was ready around 1:00 p.m. The polyester film cover flew off from the heat when the cookie was finished baking, and the astonished crowd of cookie-lovers got to witness the unveiling of the world’s largest chocolate chip cookie.
Immaculate Baking Company set a new world record, and they were able to raise $20,000 for the Folk Artists Foundation Museum. People purchased sections of the cookie for $10 a box. Their record still stands for baking the largest cookie in the world.
More Big Cookie Records
Why go to the trouble of baking enormous cookies? In the late 1800’s, a baker named William Lawrence produced an oatmeal cookie that weighed a staggering 40 pounds. Lawrence possibly started an attention-grabbing trend to see who could bake the biggest cookies. For decades, competitive bakers have accepted the challenge by experimenting with different ingredients and nontraditional ovens in order to push the boundaries of cookie size. Here are a few other record-holders for world’s largest cookies:
- The world’s largest gingerbread man was baked by the staff at IKEA in Oslo, Norway, in 2009. It weighed 1,435 pounds.
- Though others claimed to have baked larger Oreos, Guinness Book awarded that honor to Mondelez Bahrain Biscuits for producing a 162-pound Oreo cookie on April 16, 2018.
- The world’s largest fortune cookie was baked by Nick Digiovanni and his uncle Roger in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 12, 2022. It weighed 3 pounds and measured 6 inches by 7 inches. This might seem small compared to the 101-foot diameter chocolate chip cookie, but considering how delicate fortune cookies are, and that they need to be folded without tearing, this was quite an achievement.
Bake Your Own Big Cookie
After reading this, you might be craving your own monster cookie. Here’s a recipe for a huge chocolate chip cookie that won’t require a special oven.
Using a springform pan (like the kind you use for cheesecake), mix together a double batch of your favorite chocolate chip cookie dough, with the following substitutions:
- Use all brown sugar instead of white sugar or a mixture of the two
- Use all butter instead of shortening or a mixture of the two
Beat room-temperature butter and brown sugar until creamy before adding the rest of the ingredients. Spread the dough in the springform pan and bake at 200° for 30 minutes. Allow to cool completely before removing the pan.
A cookie this size is perfect for decorating with buttercream frosting, so mix up a batch and write Happy Birthday or whatever the occasion calls for.
Enjoy your huge cookie without the months of preparation that was required to bake the Guinness World Record holder.