Double Fudge Cookies

One of the people that I know who has been trying (rather unsuccessfully, she says) to make her "perfect cookies", complained that in most cases, the cookie dough just tastes like butter, and nothing else. I don't see what's wrong with this, since I like buttery cookies :), but I do see how some people would prefer a cookie that's more... chocolatey. So I was wondering if there would be such a recipe where melted chocolate would be mixed in with the dough (I usually just see cocoa powder). That's when I came across this, in a food blog called Notes from the Cookie Jar. They're apparently very chocolatey (and with over 300g of chocolate in them, I can see why!), so I thought I'd give it a try. So here we go~

What you need:
350g semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 cups plain flour
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
230g butter, softened
1 1/2 cups packed dark brown sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons instant coffee powder (optional)

What you do:

1. Melt the chocolate, and set aside. (I used a microwave. As usual, be careful not to burn.)
2. In a bowl, add flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt. Stir well to combine, and set aside.
3. In another bowl, beat the butter with a mixer until light and fluffy.
4. Add brown sugar and mix well.
5. Add eggs one at a time, beating well between additions. Remember to stop and scrape the sides of the bowl once in awhile.
6. Add in the vanilla and coffee powder and mix well.
7. Add the melted chocolate, and mix until combined.
8. With a wooden spoon, stir in the flour mixture and mix until just combined.
9. Using tablespoons, drop onto a cookie sheet about 2 inches apart.
10. Bake at 150 C for approximately 20-22 minutes. The cookies come out quite soft, so test (carefully!) with a finger to see if they are set when you take them out.
11. Cool on a wire rack, before storing in a container.

First off, I made a few additions. I added just a bit more of salt, and also added some coffee. A brownie recipe I have adds in coffee with the chocolate and it tastes really good. Complements the chocolatey flavour well, so I thought it would be nice here. Also, since I like my cookies with a little bit of crunch, I replaced 1/2 cup of the brown sugar with just under 1/2 cup of vanilla (caster) sugar. Also, the original recipe didn't really mention where to mix in the melted chocolate. I asked the author about it, but I really wanted to make these today and was too impatient to wait for her answer, meh. :P After reading a few other recipes on the Internet, I hazarded a guess and mixed them in after the vanilla. :$

I don't know whether it was because of that guess or not, but the cookie dough seemed weirdly stiff. Or maybe I'm just not used to this kind of cookie dough, haha, since I usually go for chocolate chips. The dough was firm enough for me to shape it with my hands. Hmmmmm.... Is that right??? Oh well, I thought maybe the chocolate had set in the cold mixture, or something. The dough was really yummy - very chocolatey with slightly crunchy coffee granules, so I decided to go ahead and bake it anyway.

Which led to the second problem. The cookies expanded - and I really mean expanded! - in the oven. Not so much to the sides, but more towards um, the sky. Which made them really thick cookies. This confused me, because in the original picture, the cookies looked quite flat. When I took the first batch out though, it seemed like they weren't quite done (after the 22 minutes). They had the texture of a cake instead of a cookie! (At this point, I was thinking... uh-oh... I think I made a boo boo :( ) But never mind. I popped them in the oven for 5 more minutes. But they were still like mini cookie-shaped brownies! Very good brownies, but not exactly what I was looking for...



I did two batches this way before I decided to do something about it. So for the third batch, I added about a tablespoon of milk into the dough (just enough for 5 large-ish cookies) and also cranked up the temperature to 175 C, and adjusted the cooking time to about 15 minutes as well. The dough that resulted was almost as soft as my usual cookie dough. I don't know whether that would affect the texture of the finished cookie, but I decided to try anyway. The finished cookies looked slightly different than the first two batches. Much smoother. But still looked like cake! One even had a cracked top because it expanded so much! In fact, they were much much cakey-er than the first batch. Whoopsie. Guess milk doesn't work...


While that batch was baking though, the other cookies seemed to have hardened somewhat. I haven't tasted the cooler cookies yet since its too close to dinner, but I had a look at the cookies the boys were eating and it was still cakey. Feh. *disappointed* :(

Trying to do *something* to make the cookies crisper, I made the cookies smaller instead - using a teaspoon instead of a tablespoon, but left the cooking time at 15 minutes (at 175 C). This seemed to work. The cookies still had a cake-y core, but were more crunchy than brownie-like. Also, this made for smaller cookie servings, which might be a good thing! Haha! :D Here's a size comparison:


But yeah... these cookies weren't really what I expected :( It was probably my fault, but still. Disappointing. Might try this kind of cookie again, but with a different recipe. That said, the mini-brownie bites I have now are very nice, haha. They're like chocolatey pieces of brownies with a lot of the crust ((upper layer) that you find in brownies. I'm one of the people who like the crisp parts of a brownie, so I suppose this will work out fine. It's like portable brownies, haha.

I was really looking forward to having cookies though. :(

Quote of the day: Nine out of ten people like chocolate. The tenth person always lies...

On a side-note, my new baking sheet works very well, hehe~