Amanda’s Chocolate Cookies
Amanda’s Chocolate Cookies comes from Amanda Hesser’s Cooking For Mr. Latte, where it is called Chocolate Chunk-Pecan-Coconut Cookies. As I have changed the recipe a great deal, removing the both the pecans and the coconut shreds, I have altered the name accordingly.
The result is a hefty chocolate chip cookie, with a faint hint of cinnamon and a touch of nutmeg. It’s a good keeper, in the freezer or out. It also travels well, if your future plans involve picnics. Or marches.
I’ve baked these cookies using all vanilla extract, vanilla and chocolate extracts, and vanilla and almond extracts. Just make sure you aren’t feeding anybody with a nut allergy.
You can tinker with the amounts of cocoa for a cookie that leans toward butterscotch–two tablespoons–or is more chocolately–in which case, use four tablespoons. I’ve used both Dutch process cocoa and regular, and don’t taste a difference, which is why I will never appear on The Great British Bake-Off.
Hesser adds a whopping 24 ounces of bittersweet chocolate to her recipe. Chocolate, like everything else, is insanely expensive at the moment, so I’m a bit more sparing, using 16 ounces (454 grams) of chocolate chips per batch. The chips themselves are a mixture of whatever I have in the house, usually white chocolate, bittersweet, and milk.
This is a recipe asking for a buttered baking sheet. If you are one of those people who saves butter wrappers but wonders why you bother, now you know. Isn’t is nice to have an answer for something?
My oven does best baking a single sheet of cookies at a time. I find the cookies bake more evenly if I rotate the baking sheet halfway into baking, a trick I learned from Dorie Greenspan.
Given recent events, there may be some folks who want nothing more than to bake a batch of cookies, pull up a chair, and eat them all. Alone. If that helps, go right ahead. But your anger is better used by writing your congressperson, or senator, or both. March if you can, donate if you can. By all means, vote.
But whatever you do, don’t let the bastards win.
Amanda’s Chocolate Cookies
Original recipe appears in Cooking for Mr. Latte, by Amanda Hesser
Yield: approximately 40 large cookies
Prep/Baking time: about 15 minutes to prepare dough, then about 40 minutes baking time.
Dough may be refrigerated up to three days or frozen up to three months before baking.
Please read notes, below, before beginning to bake.
two sticks/8 ounces/227 grams unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup/8 ounces/227 grams sugar
1 cup/8 ounces/227 grams light brown sugar, lightly packed
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/8th teaspoon fine sea salt or regular table salt
1/8th teaspoon cinnamon (optional but nice)
scraping nutmeg (also optional but nice)
2 3/4 cups/550 grams all-purpose flour
2-4 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon chocolate extract
3 large eggs
2 cups/16 ounces/400 grams chocolate chips
A stand mixer is best for this recipe, but a hand mixer will work. You’ll also need two baking sheets, cooling racks, and a large bowl.
Preheat the oven to 350F/180C
Butter the baking sheets. If you have a third, butter that one, too. I save butter wrappers for this, as noted above.
Unwrap the butter and put it either in the bowl of the stand mixer or if using a handheld mixer, a large bowl.
Put the sugars in a two-cup measuring cup and empty it into the mixing bowl, over the butter.
Using the same measuring cup, measure the baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, and cocoa powder into the bowl.
Now crack the eggs into the same cup. Measure the extracts into the eggs.
The chips will have to go into another cup.
This is how you bake in a drought without a dishwasher.
Using the mixer’s paddle attachment, blend the butter with the sugars on low speed, moving to medium speed. You’ll need to stop and scrape down the mixing bowl and remove dough from the paddle. It’s annoying. Do this for about five minutes, until the sugar and butter are blended and fluffy.
Add the eggs one at a time, blending, being sure to scrape around the bottom of the mixing bowl. The batter may appear curdled. Don’t worry: it’ll come together when the flour is added.
Add the flour gradually AT LOW SPEED. Otherwise, you will flour your kitchen. We all do this once, and the clean-up is not amusing.
Once the flour is added, the batter should resemble chocolate frosting.
Add the chips. If your mixer is like mine, it will complain. I hold the bowl at the sides, where I cannot be injured. Be careful.
Once the chips are blended, remove the bowl from the mixer. You can now chill the batter in the fridge for a few days or freeze it up to three months.
Using a one-tablespoon measure, scoop the batter on to the baking sheet, giving each cookie some room. They don’t spread much; I can get eight cookies on a large baking sheet.
Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes, depending on your oven, rotating the baking sheet halfway through baking time. Cookies take 10 minutes in my oven. They’re done when you see browning along the bottom and the tops no longer appear damp.
Remove cookies to cooling racks with metal spatula. Allow to cool before storing. They keep well at room temperature up to two weeks or freeze well up to three months.
Notes:
The original recipe calls for two teaspoons vanilla extract. You can use this, or try chocolate, almond, or coffee extracts. If you use almond, be sure your eaters don’t have nut allergies.
I’ve baked these cookies using a range of cocoa powder. Less gives a more butterscotch flavor. The choice is yours.
You can also add nuts. I don’t, as I am usually baking for homeless people and have no way of knowing who has nut allergies.
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