I'm afraid that these aren't nearly as healthy as the other things we've spoken about on this page, but I did cook a load of them for Refugee Week - and I thought people might want to make some themselves!
Ingredients
- 125g of bread flour
- 95g of boring, run of the mill flour
- 2 teaspoons of salt
- 1 teaspoon of baking soda
- 225g of unsalted butter
- 220g dark brown sugar
- 100g of white sugar
- 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon of espresso powder
- 1 egg
- 1 egg yolk (so really, you need two eggs)
- 85 of semi-sweet chocolate chips
- 130g of dark chocolate
Prep
- First thing to do is melt the butter. Stick it in a pan and keep stirring it - ideally it ought to go a bit brown but the closer you get to that the easier it is to burn it, so don't worry too much. Once you're happy that it's properly melted, tip it into something and then add some water so you're up to about 240ml of liquid.
- Next you wait what will feel like an eternity for the butter to cool to something like room temperature, and stirring it, and checking to make sure it hasn't gone solid. This is incredibly boring so while it's going on, you can work on some other stuff.
- Chop the dark chocolate into small bits. Pro-tip, use a bread knife. I don't know why that makes it easier, but it does. Scientific.
- Get a medium sized bowl and sift all the flower, the baking soda and the salt together into it.
- Get a larger bowl, and throw in the sugar, espresso powder and the vanilla. If you don't like coffee, put less espresso powder in? I don't know - some people I know who love coffee just say "you put too much in", and then I say "no I didn't", and then they eat the cookies anyway. So I guess experiment. I am so the best tutor for this sort of stuff.
- Crack the egg into the larger bowl with the sugar, and then add the second egg yolk.
- By now the butter should have cooled. If not, make yourself a drink and regret having got this far into the process when it would have been easier to just buy some cookies from Tesco. If it has cooled, that goes into the large bowl with the sugar and the eggs too.
- Whisk everything in the sugar bowl together until it's all light and fluffy and stuff. Really, provided it looks like some vaguely tasty brown goo, you're probably on the right track with it.
- Looks really good, right, bet you want to just try some? Don't, there's raw egg in there.
- Once you're done with step 8, start adding the flour mix into the bowl. Just do it in small amounts at a time. I tend to do it 1/3 at a time because I'm basically impatient, but if you're sensible, do 1/4. Anyway, beat that until it's all incorporated. Congratulations on your large bowl of floury brown goo.
- Grab a wooden spoon and fold in all the chocolate chips and the dark chocolate you chopped up after sorting the butter.
- Cover the bowl with cling film and stick it in the fridge for 24 hours. This will help the flavour of the cookies, and make them super cold so when you put them in the oven tomorrow they'll remain cookie shaped and not turn into a delicious cookie puddle.
- Get the mix out of the fridge. You should be able to grab clumps of it and ball it up. You should aim for about three tablespoons worth of cookie dough per ball. So make sure you wash your hands.
- Oh, and go back to yesterday and wash your hands before you start as well.
- Heat the oven to 180°C
- Stick the balls of cookie dough on some baking paper on a tray, properly spaced - I'm not going to even try to tell you what properly spaced means, just resign yourself to the fact that the first batch you cook off with mash together a bit and make an adjustment from that point onwards. You're going to be getting about 18 cookies out of that and you can hide the malformed ones at the bottom of the pile when you present them.
- Stick the cookies in the over for about 13 minutes
- When that's done, leave them on the baking tray (outside of the oven, obviously) for about 5 minutes, then transfer them to a proper cooling rack.
- Do another batch.
- Keep going until there's no more cookie dough.
