Week 3 - Chocolate Chunk + Chip Cookies (Page 34), Double Chocolate Chunk + Chip Cookies (Page 35)

To skip the babble and get to the food, click here.

To jump to my variation of the recipe, click here.

To jump to the photos, this week you're gonna have to scroll. Sorry. They're peppered throughout.

To skip all my babble and get to the conclusion, click here.

Check out Kristen's post of this cookie here!

This has been quite the week in my kitchen! We had a power outage on Wednesday, and then on Saturday as I was going to bake these cookies - my oven would. not. heat. I started the preheating as the dough was in the fridge chilling, and after 30 minutes it was still ice cold. *cue sobbing* My lovely sister-in-law was gracious enough to loan me her oven for the morning (we maintained COVID safety protocols during the hours I was there) to bake these cookies + my weekly bread bake.

WHEW

Yesterday over lunch, my spouse and I went looking for the fuse panel in the oven that normally is there, but wasn't in this oven. As I was finishing up work, my spouse broke out his multimeter and proceeded to troubleshoot the connection points & the element. He discovered a loose connection, re-set it and VOILA! I have a working oven again!

OK. Enough oven drama, on to the cookies.

These cookies were made in a similar process as the oatmeal cookies last week. Cream the butter, add the sugar, egg, dry ingredients, mix ins. Drastically different results from last week, though. These didn't spread a whole lot and they've got a good thickness to them as well. I think the double chocolate version turned out much better looking than the standard recipe, personally, even though they both taste bonkers awesome. I would absolutely make these again, particularly the version of the double chocolate ones I did.

Chocolate Chunk & Chip - The original recipe

I love chocolate, but more than that - I love GOOD chocolate. For these cookies, I had dreams of using some Lindt 70% dark I had for the chunks, and some Chipits mini dark chips for the chips.

107g of chunks for each recipe - I'm doing some damage to our after dinner chocolate stash, but that's okay. I'm happy to use it up if it saves me a trip out.

The recipe calls for chunks in 3/8" pieces. So yes, I actually broke out a ruler to see how I could cut these babies up. The 'squares' of Lindt are an inch wide, as you can see to the left.

They are not, however, an inch wide, as you can see to the left. This was kind of annoying, because I was prepared to cut each square into four 1/2" squares (close enough to 3/8" for this project, Mr. Keller) but alas - these weren't square.

So. What's a girl to do, on a Saturday night before she realizes her oven is broken? Not care and chop the squares into quarters anyway? Yep - that's exactly what I did.

Well. I tried to anyway. These are now sitting on my table being nibbled on by B and I. I wanted nice, evenly spaced chunks, so I ended up busting open my Cacao Barry 70% Saint-Domingue couverture (remember me saying I love GOOD chocolate?). These were around 3/8" wide so game on.

I also wanted something a bit different for the double chocolate - which I'll tell you about below.

After the problem of the chocolate was solved, the rest was pretty straightforward. There was salt in this cookie! Yay! Another addition which was surprising but made a HUGE difference from other cookies I've had was a bit of blackstrap molasses.

Because of the oven situation, I needed to refrigerate my cookie balls until I could bake them, so these were baked from cool-ish, but not fridge cold. I kept them on the counter as I baked my weekly bread so they had a chance to warm up.

I love giant cookies, rather than splitting the batch into small and large this week I did all big cookies, and have zero regrets.

The cookies were baked with no convection, and the oven's owner warned me about a hotspot at the back left of her oven, so I made sure that the back left of the cookie pan was empty - these cookies still spread a bit and got toasty around the edges, but the centre of them are still beautiful, thick and soft.

My observations:

The cookies are fantastic. The combination of chips and chunks provide a different experience with the chocolate since they melt differently.
The molasses really added depth of flavour and was a nice addition - I'll do this again in future cookies because I really enjoyed the flavour.

My spouse, B, sampled these cookies with me.

Our conclusions:

These cookies are bonkers.
B, who doesn't typically like chocolate, loves these cookies
The quality of chocolate matters when you make cookies like this, where the chocolate is a key feature.
The Crunch/Soft texture combination is fantastic in a cookie like this
Big cookies are where it's at.

A couple of photos:

Double Chocolate Chip & Chip - My variation

These cookies are basically the same as the cookies above, except for the swap of some cocoa for some flour. Process and other ingredients are the same.

When I was out looking for good chocolate Saturday morning, I noticed that there was one bag of Guittard green mint chocolate chips left on the shelf. It was calling to me (mint and chocolate are in my top 5 flavour combinations) so I picked them up and it was on the way home I decided to use them in this recipe :D

What I forgot to do, however, was take out the other chips, so this is actually a Chocolate chip and mint chip. I'm not mad about it either, because the level of chocolate to mint in this cookie is fantastic.

The Double Chocolate (Triple Chocolate) cookies with the green mint chips

This cookie is, dare I say, perfect.

She's thick, round, soft in the middle but has a slight crunch on the outside. The mint is subtle, the chocolate isn't overpowering, and they're insanely delicious. Quite possibly my new favourite cookie.

It's also worth noting that I baked three of the double chocolate cookies and three of the regular chocolate chip cookies at a time, to see whether or not more time out of the fridge mattered to the bake. It did not.

TL;DR Conclusion:

These cookies are amazing.
Molasses in cookies is not a bad thing
Good chocolate can turn chocolate haters into chocolate likers.

Thanks for reading! Can't wait for week #4!

Post Script: I came downstairs to take the photos of the cookies, and found these two sitting on the rack. "Cookie photos look better with bites taken out of them!" he said.