Half a Pound of Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Oh eff. This is what I said, out loud even, having just come home from the gym where I tend to work up an appetite voracious enough to make steamed cabbage taste divine, and clicked on Gwendolyn’s blog and these babies popped up and practically licked me in the face. Or it may have been me licking the computer – I can’t remember. I mean – look at them. Love at first sight? I believe.
The baker in me was intrigued by the use of cornstarch in this particular dough. Not much – only 2 tsp. to 2 cups of flour. Would it really make a difference? Or is it gimmicky? Designed to lure in people like me who are hungry and haven’t eaten a freshly baked chocolate chunk cookie in far too long?
So I made them – for research purposes only. Besides, I’ll be seeing Anna Olson – Gwendolyn’s cookie muse – at Christmas in November at the Jasper Park Lodge in a month – I could use this as a conversation piece. You know, something to chit chat about.
There’s a half pound of chopped chocolate in these. (That sounds way better than 8 oz or 2 cups, don’t you think?) Go semisweet or as dark as you like. I do like chopped chocolate in a cookie rather than chips – you get that spread of teeny bits to enormous chunks, which works in these. They really are All That, and interestingly enough the cornstarch – perhaps paired with the low sugar-flour ratio – produces a cookie very different from those I generally fall back on. They have that thick denseness reminiscent of the ones I used to get at Cookies by George when we took the bus downtown after school. They aren’t cakey, but they aren’t as chewy as most. But yet they are chewy. At any rate, they’re totally fab. Even Ben looked up from the table and said, all contemplative and serious (particularly for an 8 year old), “wow, these are really good chocolate chip cookies.”
I sprinkled a few with a bit of crunchy salt for salted dark chocolate cookies. I know, the whole salted caramel/chocolate combo is so last year. Who cares? It’s also so delicious.
These are totally ridiculously easy to make. You don’t need to age the dough, or chill it, or do anything but nibble at it as you stir, then scoop (I really do love my levered scoop – ask Santa for one) and bake. Never before has superherosim been so easy.
Half a Pound of Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies
With thanks to Gwendolyn and Anna.
3/4 cup butter, at room temp
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
8 oz. dark or semi-sweet chocolate, chopped into chunksPreheat oven to 350F.
In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugars until pale and almost fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla.
Add the flour, cornstarch, baking soda and salt and stir or beat on low until almost combined; add the chocolate chunks and stir just until blended.
Drop dough by the spoonful onto a parchment-lined (or buttered) sheet and bake for 10-14 minutes (depending on their size) until golden around the edges but still soft in the middle. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Makes about 1 1/2 dozen large cookies.
September 23 2011 | cookies & squares | 36 Comments »
