Hint of Chocolate Cookies

This is a Dave’s Bread Corner recipe in disguise. I know, you’re thinking cookies aren’t bread at all but my husband loves cookies and aside from bread they are one of his go to baked goods to make. A common pattern when he’s in the kitchen baking is that he prefers no-fuss recipes. If a cookie recipe says to chill it in the fridge for a while or calls for “odd” ingredients he will often look for a different one, or more commonly simply adjust the recipe to not involve them.

This recipe was invented by him while he was half asleep. He woke up and was apparently thinking of cookies one morning and rambled off how he would make a new tasty cookie and which ingredients he would use. The result was this recipe. It’s a lightly chocolaty cookie with white chocolate chips. The goal was that the standard chocolate chip cookie base flavor still shined through. It’s his personal favorite cookie base and he’s even been known to make batches of them without chocolate chips at all just so he could enjoy the flavor without anything else in the way. These weren’t just invented by him, he’s also the one that baked them for the blog.

Hint of Chocolate Cookies Recipe
(Makes 16 ginormous cookies)

Ingredients:

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup (equivalent to 1 and 1/2 sticks) butter
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 and 1/2 cups white chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Line a baking sheet with a silicon mat or parchment paper and set it aside.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder. Set the dry ingredients aside.
Cream the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar.
Mix in the vanilla extract.
Mix in the eggs, one at a time.
Gradually mix in the dry ingredients. (He did it in thirds.)
Stir in the white chocolate chips with a spatula.
Use a 1/4 cup measuring cup as the portion for each cookie.
Bake them four to a tray in the preheated oven for about 15 minutes.
Let them rest for about 3 minutes and transfer them to a cooling rack.

Source: Dave’s Bread Corner (my hubby)

This represents what my husband describes as “properly creamed” butter. You have to put in the time because, well, you just do. If you wimp out and stop early the texture of the whole cookie can end up weird. To paraphrase Alton Brown, you need the sugar crystals to poke holes in the fat molecules and you need to give it the time to do that.

The cocoa is a dry ingredient here because melting chocolate bars is too big of a pain. As a kid, my husband always enjoyed “barely chocolate” milk. Just like any other kid’s chocolate milk concoction except with no where near as much chocolate. These cookies follow a similar goal. Get the chocolate in there, but just enough to make you smile without taking over your entire palate.

Once the dry ingredients are incorporated into the wet ingredients the dough should be slightly tacky but not sticky or crumbly. It’s a happy medium we’re going for here. If your dough is too sticky it means you don’t have enough flour and you will likely end up with flat greasy cookies. If your dough is crumbly the opposite is true. You’ve got too much flour and you will end up with odd and dry cookies. (Which are usually still edible, but the texture will probably be pretty weird.)

In the vein of seriously fuss-less cookie making, this cookie dough was never chilled. It also wasn’t man-handled when portioning out the cookies. It was simply dolloped 1/4 cup at a time onto the pan and considered good to go. They may look lumpy and tall at this point, but don’t forget that all that butter will melt and gravity will prevail. They will become cookie shaped all on their own while they are in the oven. For his first batch he wasn’t sure how much they would spread so he made only 3 cookies instead of 4 on the pan. All of his follow up batches were 4 cookies each and they didn’t bump into each other.

What comes out the other side of this cookie making adventure is large cookies designed to satisfy a proper cookie craving with only one cookie. (Those are regular sized chocolate chips, not mini ones.)

They are chocolaty but not too chocolaty. One might say there is a hint of chocolate. 🙂 They are chewy on the inside and a tad crunchy on the outside.

Look at all those white chocolate chips! I love the white and chocolate contrast.

Silicon mats are amazing! We started using them only a couple of years ago and I can’t believe it took us that long. With all the baking that we do they are totally worth the investment. Now I never have to wonder if we need to grease the baking pan because we just don’t.

My husband baked these cookies the same day that I baked the Sprinkle Cookies. I love baking in the kitchen together. 🙂 Unlike him, I’m willing to bake with shortening and corn starch, chill my cookies, roll the measured out dough into nice clean shapes, and fuss with the presentation. Perhaps it’s the food blogger in me. 😉 I chose to honor his no fuss cookie-dom by photographing his creation in the most no fuss way possible.