Sunday 12th January 2020
Cookies are just about a way of life for me, I can never get enough of them! Before I went on Christmas break, I was baking cookies every Monday when I got back in from placement, and once they were baked, I would eat a cookie and do some crochet, before I considered starting some work. Sometimes, I wouldn’t do work and just eat a couple of cookies whilst crafting for the entire evening.
During this weekly cookie baking session I perfected these brown butter and dark chocolate cookies which are mouth-wateringly good. These cookies would make the kitchen smell amazing as making the brown butter makes everything smell a bit like toffee, and freshly baked cookies, well that just tops everything off!
As I said, I did a lot of crochet before Christmas, since it is a great and easy way to make people presents without breaking the bank- great for the life of a student. Somehow, my flatmate became very interested in it as well and as a result, I have just spent the weekend teaching her how to crochet. I must admit that she is doing phenomenally for never having done this before, even if she doesn’t believe so. Whilst I have been writing this, I have been helping her but she is needing my help less and the last half an hour has come on leaps and bounds.
These cookies are most certainly a new favourite of mine as they’re crispy at the edges and soft in the centre with a slight toffee/caramel taste and large chocolate pools. In other words, they’re pretty much the perfect cookie in my opinion. They taste amazing straight out of the oven whilst the chocolate is still gooey, but they taste even better the next day, heated through slightly so that the chocolate melts again.
This batch of cookies makes an impressive 16 cookies out of it, but you can freeze the cookie dough once you have made them in to balls, if you don’t want to cook them all straight away and would rather have a stash in the freezer, ready to make at a moment’s notice. Just remember that if you bake them from frozen, you need to increase the baking time by a couple of minutes.
Makes 16
Ingredients:
80g Light Brown Sugar
80g Caster Sugar
125g Unsalted Butter
1tsp Vanilla Extract
1 Egg
250g Plain Flour
1tsp Baking Powder
1tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
300g Dark Chocolate Chunks
Method:
- To make the brown butter, melt the butter in a saucepan over a medium-low heat. Once the butter has melted, keep the butter on the heat, stirring regularly, until it starts to go a medium brown colour at which point, remove from the heat and allow to cool down slightly. The butter may foam up in the pan whilst it is browning, so keep an eye on the butter.
- Preheat the oven to 160°C Fan and line 2 baking trays with some parchment paper
- Beat the browned butter and the 2 sugars together until they are combined, adding in the egg and the vanilla and beating again until everything is combined
- Add the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and the chocolate chunks in to the wet mixture and fold in, until a cookie dough has formed
- Form balls of cookie dough using either your hands, 2 spoons or an ice cream scoop, and then place on to the tray, leaving about 4cm between each cookie.
- Bake in the oven for 11 minutes, before taking out of the oven and hitting the tray on a worktop (this helps the cookies to deflate and spread, resulting in a chewier cookie). Put the cookies back in the oven for another minute and a half, before removing the cookies to hit them on the worktop. Place the cookies back in the oven for a final minute and a half, removing the cookies and hitting the tray on the worktop one last time before allowing them to cool.
