If you’re a fan of chewy cookies and big chunks of chocolate (none of your neat little choc bits here!) and you want the best chocolate chip cookie recipe you’ve ever made look no further for your next treat than these golden drops of pure happiness.
Ingredients
- 185g butter
- 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 1 1/2 cups self raising flour
- 1/2 cup plain flour
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- 1 egg yolk, lightly beaten
- 2 tsp vanilla essence or medium dry cooking sherry
- 200g of dark cooking chocolate, roughly chopped
Method
Melt butter and set aside to cool – it’s important that the butter has cooled before you add it to the other ingredients or it will melt the chocolate and cook the egg in the mix (it’s a rookie mistake – I’ve made it before when trying to rush a batch of these through and it didn’t end well!).
In a large bowl combine the flours and brown sugar. I use a whisk to do this as it aerates the flour and breaks up the lumps of brown sugar perfectly.
Whisk the egg and egg yolk together with the vanilla essense or sherry (I ran out of vanilla essence one day and used sherry instead – it worked just as well to add that little bit of depth to the taste).
Blend the egg mix into the butter and set aside.
Now for the fun bit – it’s time to chop chocolate. Assuming you bought a big block of cooking chocolate, you’re going to need to cut it into smaller squares. You still want big chunks though – that’s what makes these cookies so great.
Look at those chunks of goodness!
Next, make a well in the centre of your dry ingredients and add the egg/butter/vanilla mix. Fold it through until it makes a soft dough-like mix – don’t worry too much if it seems a little wet at the moment, we can fix that after we add the chocolate if need be.
Add the chocolate chunks to the dough, and mix just enough to distribute them evenly – don’t over handle the mix. It’s not supposed to be perfectly even.
If the mix still seems a little wet you can add a touch more flour – but remember you want the cookies to be nice and chewy, so you don’t want the dough to be too dry.
*Side note: the amount of liquid needed to make a good dough will vary slightly depending on how old your flour is and how you’ve stored it. So sometimes you may need more or less liquid than a recipe calls for.
The next bit is to decide how big you want your cookies to be. They will spread a bit, so make them roughly 1/2-3/4 as big as you want the finished product to be.
Lay them out nicely paced on a tray lined with baking paper. And then, if you want to take the flavour to the next level … sprinkle them with a little Himalayan Pink Salt.
Trust me – it’s divine!
Bake them for about 12 minutes in a moderate oven – that’s roughly 180* Celsius or about 375* Farenheit. Again, how long you bake them will depend on how ‘hot’ your oven runs and how dark you like your cookies. They will still be a little soft when they’re cooked though – they firm up on the rack as they cool. Cool them on the tray for a couple of minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Get ready to do a lot of hand slapping as the cookies cool – particularly if you have boys in the house 🙂
Once completely cool, transfer to an airtight container. They keep well for about a week – if they last that long!
If by some miracle they last long enough to get a bit stale, you can crumble them up into ice cream for a yummy dessert.