Monday, August 18, 2008

Delicious Dark Chocolate Cookies

Mark has an addiction. He is addicted to food blogs. Especially bloggers that write about sweets they've baked. He found a recipe recently that I decided to try out today. I made a few modifications to the recipe before baking them, and then decided that there are a few more I'll make when I make them again. And believe me - I will totally make these again. I thought I'd share the recipe, with my modifications, with all of you.

I want to share more of our successful recipes online. I think it will be a good place for me to look back at our recipes when I'm looking for something special or especially yummy.

So...here you go! Enjoy - and let me know if you try it and whether you like them!

Delicious Dark Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients
• 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup white chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup walnuts

Preparation
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, Fahrenheit.

Grease cookie sheet(s). Whisk flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt together in a bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until fluffy.

If you have one of these, use it. If you don't have one of these, get one.


To creamed butter, add sugar and vanilla. If you're lucky like me, your husband has made some home-made vanilla, and you'll have that deliciousness to add to your baking.

If you have a husband like mine, use him. If you don't, get one.


Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla until well blended. Add flour mixture and beat until combined. Mix in semi-sweet chips, white chocolate chips and walnuts with a spatula.

I like my cookies small - that way I feel like I can have more. So I rounded about a tablespoon's worth of cookie batter and flattened it into a small round. Doing this yielded about 30 cookies. They do not spread much, so you can put them fairly close to each other on the baking sheet.

Unbaked cookie dough:


Bake cookies about 12 minutes, until center is slightly firm and top is cracked. Cool completely on cookie sheet.

Baked cookies (no, the cookies didn't multiply on the sheet while baking; I took pictures of the two different cookie sheets I was using):


These are the changes I made to the original recipe:
1. The original recipe calls for Old Fashioned Oats. I put them in when I made both batches, but I don't think they brought anything to the cookies. I used 3 tablespoons of oats, even though the recipe called for 2 tablespoons, and I still didn't get anything out of using the oats. So I won't use them next time.

2. The recipe called for espresso powder. While I have no doubt that might be tasty, Mark hates all things coffee, so why would I make cookies that he won't eat? And, if you have a four-year old in the house, there's no reason to make cookies with caffeine in them!

3. The recipe didn't use nuts. But, I love nuts in a cookie. Especially walnuts. So I made half a batch without nuts and half with. The ones with walnuts are MUCH more delicious.

4. The original cooking time was 14 minutes. Usually, I have to cook things at least 5 minutes LONGER than the cooking time a recipe calls for. With these cookies, though, I took two minutes OFF of the cooking time and the cookies weren't as, um, crispy the second time around. They're still crispy, but they're better cooked less time. I bet you could even cook them for 10 minutes and be good to go.

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