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Yup. That's right. Cocoa Pebbles cereal is the secret to making the ultimate chocolate cookie. I use it in almost all of my chocolate-based cookies:
Chocolate & Salted Caramel
Peanut Butter Cup Cookies
Fake-Out-Eos
German Chocolate Cake Cookies
Chocolate & Sea Salt Cookies
There's nothing like a stormy NYC Monday to make you want to run off to someplace warm and sunny. Don't let the weather get you all Carpenters and mopey. Fire up your oven and take a cookie vacation:
California Cookies
Hawaii Cookies
Do You Like Pina Coladas?
Florida Cookies
Lime in the Coconut
Raspberry in the Coconut
Orange in the Coconut
And remember: Baking is always cheaper than flying...or even driving.
A while back, Princess Ariele asked me to make a special cookie just for her. What else could I say other than “As you wish”?
So here it is: the chewiest, richest, chocolatiest, most brownie-ish chocolate cookie I could come up with…topped with sea salt. Yes...sea salt.
(This isn't a new chocolate cookie recipe per se, but this treatment is new. For a similar but still unique application, check out my Chocolate & Salted Caramel Cookies.)
For those of you who haven't tried the deliciousness that is chocolate (or caramel or any other sweet) topped with a sprinklin' of sea salt, you don't know what you're missing. Believe me: You've got to give it a try.
The secret to this chocolate cookie is, of course, in the chocolate. I use four layers of chocolate: cocoa powder, unsweetened Baker's chocolate, microplaned milk chocolate, and...ground-up Cocoa Pebbles. That's right: Cocoa Pebbles.
Makes 4 dozen cookies.
(To see this recipe in process, check out Picturing Chocolate & Sea Salt Cookies.)
Creamables |
2 sticks butter 2 cups dark brown sugar 1/4 cup cocoa powder |
Wet Ingredients |
2 eggs 2 tablespoons milk 1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla |
Dry Ingredients |
3 1/2 cups roughly ground Cocoa Pebbles cereal 2 1/2 cups oatmeal 1 1/2 cups flour 1/4 cup cocoa powder 2 1/2 ounces milk chocolate, microplaned 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, microplaned 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt |
Topping |
1/4 cup sea salt |
Tracey, a reader in Washington, tried out my Chocolate & Chipotle Cookies and had this to say:
“OK Fred ... I mean Greg (inside joke) I finally got my cinnamon chocolate chips I ordered, made these cookies and I have to say I HATE YOU!!!! OMG they are so good, the heat is perfect and even tho while making them I thought you had lost your mind adding so much cinnamon but WOW!!! The only thing I did different is I flattened them slightly with a glass as I am not a fan of puffy cookies, just a quirk of mine. The crispy outside combined with the chewy inside HEAVEN!!!!! I had a nice Merlot that went with them perfectly!!!”
Ha! Thanks, April...er, um...Tracey. (And thanks for the "Hole Mole" subtitle!) I'm so glad you liked them. And that's a good tip about flattening the dough balls a little before baking. This is a trick I used when I made my White Chocolate Macaroons and with about half of the Chocolate & Chipotle Cookies I made, including the ones in the picture above.
Flattening the dough balls a little before you bake them allows you to customize the look and texture of your cookies. Try it the next time you bake. Flattened cookies have a little more of an exterior crunch than nonflattened cookies, but the interiors of both kinds remain perfectly chewy.
Lorraine, Jon's mom, was recently at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and spotted Star Kay White lavender extract in the gift shop. She picked up a bottle and sent it to me. Thanks, Lorraine! I got it yesterday.
It looks like I can use it for baking or aromatherapy. From the bottle's label:
“Pure lavender extract has a fresh, sweet, floral aroma and flavor. May be used in baking as you would vanilla extract. Can also be added to a bath to relieve tension and stress.”
This stuff smells really good. I'm ready to take a nap...
Stay tuned for some tasty, stress-relieving lavender cookies! I'm thinking of making a lavender-infused base topped with a light, lemony icing.
Here's the recipe for my Orange in the Coconut Cookies in process.
Cream the creamables. Two sticks of butter, two cups of dark brown sugar.
Combine the wet ingredients. Mmmm...orange zest smells yummy. (Have I mentioned that I love my microplane?) Add the wet ingredients to the creamables, then give 'em a spin.
Combine the dry ingredients. Don't forget to toast the coconut! Then add the dry ingredients to the combined creamables and wet ingredients. (D'oh! I forgot to take pics of this last bit.)
Scoop and bake the cookies. It's a wet dough, but it makes perfect cookies!
I had oranges on the brain yesterday, and I had a batch of cookies to bake. So what did I do? I stopped by the grocery store and picked up some coconut and oranges and got a-cookie making.
My Lime in the Coconut and Raspberry in the Coconut cookies were among my most popular, so this orange version was a real no-brainer.
As with the other two cookies in this "in the coconut" recipe series, I use multiple sources of fruit flavor (zest, juice, extract) and coconut flavor (toasted coconut, coconut extract, and cream of coconut). The combination is awesome! They smell and taste like a tropical holiday. (Which reminds me that I've still got to do a mojito cookie sometime this summer...) And the texture is just right--the perfect balance of chewy and crispy.
Sorry, Princess Ariele. My grocery store didn't have the key ingredient for the sea salt-topped chocolate cookies you requested. But I hope these guys make up for it. I promise I'll make your chocolate cookies soon!
Makes about 4 dozen cookies. (To see this recipe in process, check out Picturing Orange in the Coconut Cookies.)
Creamables |
2 sticks butter 2 cups dark brown sugar |
Wet Ingredients |
1 egg 1/4 cup cream of coconut
1/4 cup orange juice 2 tablespoons orange extract 2 tablespoons orange zest 1 tablespoon coconut extract 1 tablespoon vanilla |
Dry Ingredients |
3 1/2 cups oatmeal 2 1/2 cups toasted coconut 1 cup flour 1 cup white chocolate chips 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt |
Reader Jenny emailed me last night to ask this question:
“You did cookies for a few states....Florida and California, etc....what about other ones? What would you do for the rest of them?”
Hi, Jenny! Thanks for writing in. I do have a few state-themed cookies on my list, for example: Hawaii, Florida, California, and Texas.
I think that doing individual cookies for the remaining 46 states would definitely be a project to keep me busy for a while, but it's something that's definitely doable.
To make a state-specific cookie, all you've got to do is find out what produce/product the state is famous for...like Georgia and peaches. Some other ideas: Maine = blueberries (or lobster!), Massachusetts = cranberries, Mississippi = Tupelo honey, Michigan = cherries. Boy...that's a lot of M states! But you get the picture.
I promise that I'll post some more state cookies soon.
Full disclosure time:
As you might remember, our criteria were texture, flavor, and appearance.
Batch 1 (aged for 2 days): The driest of the three batches. Had a nice nutty flavor the other batches didn't have. Looked kind of Chips Ahoy-ish.
Batch 2 (aged for 1 day): A really nice texture--nice and chewy. Just the the right amount of sweetness, and the vanilla flavor was more pronounced here than in the other batches. Nicely browned, with a really homemade-looking craggy exterior.
Batch 3 (fresh, not aged): Soft interior, crisper exterior. Nice taste but noticeably less "forceful" than the other batches. Lighter in color than the other batches and not as flat.
As Jon told me last night, cookies from all three batches are bring-in-able. (In fact, he did bring them in to work this morning.) But the winner is...Batch 2!
We both felt that Batch 2, which had aged for a day in the refrigerator before baking, had the best texture, flavor, and appearance. I liked the nuttiness of Batch 1, but the cookies were a little dry for me. Batch 3 was good overall, but the cookies just lacked that little something that Batch 2 had.
Hmm... It turns out there is something to that whole line about letting cookie dough age. I'm going to add this advice to my Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies recipe.
Thanks, everybody, for tuning in to my Adventures in Chocolate Chip Cookiesitting project!
And here's Batch 3.
And here's Batch 2. Two down, one to go!
No, not Adventures in Babysitting...adventures in cookiesitting!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm testing the theory presented in the New York Times that aging chocolate chip cookie dough for a couple days in the refrigerator produces the best chocolate chip cookies.
Granted, the Times didn't address oatmeal-based chocolate chip cookies, but I figured aging an oatmeal-based dough was worth a try. (But if you want my opinion, oatmeal is the secret to making the perfect chocolate chip cookie.)
So now comes the scientific method part. I'm going to make three separate batches of dough, aging each for different a amount of time:
Then I'll bake off each batch this Sunday and evaluate the cookies for texture, flavor, and appearance. Each batch will be a 1/4 recipe of my Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies.
But now comes the hard part: letting the Batch 1 dough chill out in the refrigerator for two days and not eating it raw, something that will be a real challenge for two guys from the milk 'n cookies crowd.
A few days ago, Mikey wrote in to ask me about toasting coconut. Here are some pics of the process.
Spread out the coconut (I use Baker's brand "angle flake" sweetened coconut) in an even layer.
Put the pan in the oven and bake at 400° for 10-15 minutes, stirring the flakes every couple minutes with a wooden spoon. Pull the coconut out just as the flakes become golden brown and still look kind of shiny. Pour the coconut in a bowl and let it cool. Tasty, crunchy, sweet...yummy!
