An attempt at chocolate chip cookies

While normally I should be posting pretty pictures of stacked, deliciously gooey-looking chocolate chip cookies, I, evidently, have failed. My first attempt at chocolate chip cookies did not go exactly as I'd hoped. I followed the recipe outlined in the Joy of Cooking, but in the end, they came out looking like this:Flat, amoeba-like structures...oddly thin, such that if you held them up to the light, you can see a bit of light coming through. Delicious, though, despite their deformities. When hot out of the oven, there was a nice juxtaposition of gooey chocolate chips and a slightly crunchy exterior. David really quite enjoyed them, as did I, but I do have the desire for them to not look so mutant-like. My mother and I speculated several reasons as to why they didn't turn out. First, the Joy of Cooking recipe has less flour than she's use to in her recipe, so that might have contributed. I was reading on another blog, that the creaming together of softened butter and sugar is an important step, in that creates air in the batter which helps the leavening process. Now, I hadn't left my butter out for a long while, so it wasn't super soft...I speculate that maybe it didn't combine well or in the appropriate way with the sugar, and thus not enough air got in the batter, and so my cookies were unable to leaven properly. In any case, I'm armed with my mother's recipe and will re-attempt the chocolate chip cookies at some point. Though I have to admit, despite my love for cookies, they are more labour intensive than say muffins or a cake (all the spooning and carefully shaping, and the switching of cookie sheets). I like the wham-bam nature of muffins...pour into cups and go! But, I will try again.