Last week when I blogged about chocolate cupcakes with fudge frosting, I used a Dede Wilson recipe and put a link through to her Web site. Since I'd never actually gone to her site, I took a look around, giving a quick scan to the recipes she has posted there. One really caught my eye: Coffee Toffee Chunk Cookies. I printed out the recipe, figuring it would be a good weekend project.
When I got home and really read over the recipe, I discovered that it appears in her Baker's Field Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies. Now that I've made these cookies, I'm left wondering how I could possibly have overlooked that recipe all these years.
Because they're not too sweet, believe it or not, these cookies seem as if they're a particularly adult indulgence. Imagine an espresso-flavored shortbread with chunks of dark chocolate and Heath Bar. The dough contains a minimal amount of sugar (1 cup total, halved between white and brown sugars) relative to the amount of butter (three sticks) and flour (3-3/4 cups). No eggs here, either. Mellowing the bite of the espresso? A bit of melted white chocolate. The cookies don't spread in the oven; they must be flattened slightly before baking. And they are divine: slightly crisp and brittle at the edges; soft and chewy in the middle; smoky from the espresso and dark chocolate; and sweet from the toffee candy chunks.
As someone who has never gotten the back-of-the-Nestle-bag Toll House cookie recipe to work, I'm always happy to find a recipe that leaves me with a nicely shaped cookie that doesn't spread to become threadbare. Dede Wilson's Coffee Toffee Chocolate Chunk Cookies might just be the best of all.
(Memo to self: Must revisit other slightly older baking books to uncover hidden gems.)
Also over the weekend, I made some "snowball" cookies, in honor of our Easter snow flurries. I'd been meaning to make them for a while, regardless of the Easter weather. Speaking of the back of the Nestle bag: Last Christmas, Nestle made white chocolate chips with red and green swirls. That bag had a really nice recipe for a simple nut shortbread with a chip-filled dough that is rolled into balls, then baked and dusted with powdered sugar. I had a partial bag of mint-swirled chips I wanted to use up, so I made these cookies with the mint chips and ground toasted walnuts. Very nice.
2 comments:
Wow, snowballs with chocolate mint chips sounds like an excellent idea.
The more I think about it, the more I'm puzzled by your lack of success with standard chocolate chip cookies.
My inability to make the classic Toll House Cookie recipe from the back of the Nestlé bag is an utter mystery to me. Maybe the issue isn't really the inability to make the recipe. Maybe it's that I don't like the cookies that come from that recipe. To me, they're always too thin. I want chunky, not thin and chewy or crispy.
Snowballs with mint chocolate chips: I think they are now on the list for Cookie Day 07. I think they'd be highly successfully mailable, too.
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