Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies for Your Sweeties

Valentine’s Day ought to be subtitled, “Annual Let’s Eat Chocolate Day.” Boxes of bon bons, truffles, heart shaped cakes, chocolate cupcakes with pink icing and heart-shaped sprinkles in red, you know–the whole nine chocolate yards, with a few roses and diamonds stuck in for luck. Sweets for our sweeties.

So add these chocolate chocolate-chip cookies to the list. Doubling up the chocolate by adding chocolate chips to a chocolate flavored cookie is a great idea for the chocolate lovers in our midst (though I know some people who not that fond of it! Incredible.) And not just for Valentine’s Day.

These cookies can turn fairly chewy or be downright crunchy depending on how long you bake them. Seven to nine minutes for chewy, up to twelve for crunchy. Sufficient butter and brown sugar creates the soft and chewy texture; cocoa powder ups the chocolate ante though there are some recipes that call for melting chocolate with butter to make the chocolate dough to which you add chocolate chips.

I always buy semi-sweet chocolate chips. I am not at all fond of milk chocolate but if that is what you like, then by all means make sure your chips are milk chocolate. It really won’t make that much difference in this recipe.

You may or may not be aware of the modern inclination to sprinkle sea salt on chocolate anything. Or to add chili or red pepper to chocolate. I am not wild about either of these practices but some people enjoy both very much. Some add salt to caramels, too. For variation, some salt is a pleasant addition to caramel or chocolate, and for the sake of experimentation, I thought I’d try it out. As it happened I had chipotle-enhanced sea-salt flakes of which I sprinkled a little on top of about half the chocolate cookies. It was actually pretty good, and perhaps worth a repeat. Depends, of course, on your audience.

Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Cookies
Serves: 3-4 dozen 2" cookies
 
Ingredients
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • ⅓ cup cocoa powder
  • ½ cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • ½ cup brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 ½ cups chocolate chips
  • Sea Salt flakes, optional
Instructions
  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees and line a couple of cookie sheets with parchment paper.
  2. Sift together the flour, baking soda and cocoa powder.
  3. Cream the butter and sugars together, then beat in the eggs and vanilla.
  4. Mix in the dry ingredients. This will make a very stiff dough.
  5. Fold in the chocolate chips.
  6. Lightly roll spoonsfull of the dough between your hands and place on cookie sheets about 2 inches apart.
  7. Bake for 7-9 minutes for a chewy cookie, up to 12 minutes for a crunchy one.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.