Salted Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies Recipe

I think I may be a little of an anomaly, because as much as I enjoy making desserts, I don't have much of a sweet tooth (aside from my one new love) and rarely crave cookies, brownies or cakes. My room is pretty devoid of desserts, because I just never felt the urge to eat them throughout the day. 

I made this dough a couple of weeks ago (it was pretty good fun mixing up all the ingredients!), then I stuck the dough in the fridge for a few days, just because I was too busy to bake and eat them. (I did try a pinch of the dough, which tasted exactly like the cookie dough that Ben and Jerry uses for their Cookie Dough Ice Cream. Hmmm.) Long story short, when J visited for some much-needed cheese-with-baguette, I finally mustered up the effort to bake them off. 

The amount of nuts and chocolate in this recipe is definitely one advantage this recipe has over B&J's dough. I could barely see the dough over all the ingredients. When baked, they were comparable to the Famous Amos Cookie Recipe I saw circulating on Facebook a little while ago. Each cookie was generously filled with chocolate and almonds. 

A tip for making chocolate chip cookies is not to use chocolate chips... (as contrarian as it sounds.) Baking chocolate chips are heat-resistant and is designed to keep the shape even at high temperatures. For this recipe (and really, every cookie recipe), you want the chocolate to melt and form huge pockets of gooey, semi-melted chocolate pools. Even couverture chocolate callets don't work as well, because they melt fast and solidify. So break out a sharp knife and a bar of chocolate and get cracking - I promise the results are worth it.

I packed the cookies up into neat boxes and was ready to dole them out to friends as usual. But yet... something about these cookies made me feel a twinge of hesitation. The twinge went away when subtracted a couple of cookies from each of my gift containers, and kept them in a tupperware comfortably within arm's length. Hunks of melted chocolate, each of them snugly embedded in a cookie, alongside crunchy roasted almonds with a slightly salted cookie batter from salted butter, and I'm starting to see how people can get deliriously happy from cookies. 


Salted Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Makes about 24 cookies
Original recipe from David Lebovitz
Ingredients
115g salted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup packed (110g) dark or light brown sugar*
1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar*
1 large egg, at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
180g (1 1/3 cup) flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon flaky sea salt or kosher salt
200g (1 1/3 cups) coarsely chopped bittersweet or semisweet chocolate
90g (1 cup) toasted almonds, coarsely chopped

Steps
1. Chop chocolate and nuts. Set aside.

2. Sift flour, baking soda, and salt together. Set aside.

3. Using an electric mixer, beat butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar until creamy.

4.  Add egg and vanilla, and continue beating.

5. Stir the flour mixture in until combined, then mix in the chopped chocolate (chocolate dust and all) and the chopped nuts.

6. Cover and chill the batter until firm. (It’s preferable to let it rest overnight in the refrigerator.) 

7. To bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 180ºC. Thaw the dough a little (10-15 minutes) before you work with the dough, just so it becomes easier to shape. But don't dawdle and wait too long. At room temperature, the texture becomes sandier and progressively harder to shape. 

8.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. Form the cookie dough into rounds about the size of a large unshelled walnut. Place the mounds evenly spaced apart on the baking sheets, and press down the tops to flatten them so they are no longer domed and the dough is even.

9. Bake the cookies for ten minutes, rotating the baking sheet midway during baking, until the cookies look about set, but are not browned.

10. Remove from the oven and quickly tap the top of each with a spatula, then return to the oven for two to five more minutes, until the tops of the cookies are light golden brown.

11. Remove from oven and let cookies cool.

Storage
The cookies can be stored at room temperature for up to five days in an airtight container. But best enjoyed on the day itself; chocolate stays molten for about 24 hours, and it solidifies the next day. 

The dough itself can be refrigerated for up to one week (Heh) or frozen for one or two months. 

*I think the cookies were a little sweet - a revelation I had after eating half the batch - and I would dial down on the sugar just a bit the next time around.