In my sophomore year of high school, I decided to really embrace my brother’s advice about high school, which was: none of it matters! Me following that advice took a lot of forms over the last three years of high school, and I have plenty of stories about it. The only update I would give to his advice is: it’s even easier to bend rules and behave like none of it matters when your grades are good. Objectively, the only thing that does matter in high school is that you learn things. So if you focus on that, and embrace that none of the other stuff matters, then you’re golden. Then, if you derail an English teacher’s discussion of free-will (by exerting your free will), but you simultaneously have one of the best grades in the class and are only able to derail it because you did your homework reading? Well… they can’t really punish you!
I digress. I bring up my brother’s advice because in my sophomore year, it led me to do a school-wide “morning meeting” presentation on this baking blog. Complete with enough brownies/cookies for the whole school. It was a smash hit… because everyone got dessert at 10:30am. I got myself a reputation as a baker. The staff was excited because a kid had volunteered to do a morning meeting. And I would argue, it helped switch up a bit what kids could volunteer to do morning meetings about.
I’m getting to the point of the story, I promise. When I was in the Q&A portion of the presentation, my astronomy/physics teacher lobbed me what should have been a very softball question: “What do you do if something goes wrong in a bake? Have you had any big challenges?” As an adult, that would have been a great opportunity to talk about my ability to learn and adapt, and how I can overcome problems and troubleshoot. I would nail that question now, like it was a job interview. But when I was 14, all that came out of my mouth was a bold faced lie: “That doesn’t really happen to me.”
?!?!??! Yes it does?!? You idiot?!?
I blame the fact that I was 14 years old and standing in front of 300+ of my peers and didn’t want to stumble through talking about my failures. Also at that point, I hadn’t had any major failures that couldn’t be salvaged. Everything I had ever made had been edible, so nothing I would classify as an utter failure. But it’s not like nothing had ever gone wrong! I could have said something!
So, that response still haunts me. The brazenness… The naivete… How foolish I was.
I bring up this story now because these cookies had one of those low-grade failures. The kind that I wouldn’t have classified as a failure worth mentioning at 14, but now at age 25 is frustrating, and I want to figure out why. These cookies spread out way too flat in the oven. They were still delicious, so not a complete failure. They were still very, verrry edible. But it’s annoying! They were flat and weird enough that I didn’t take them in to work.
I baked these in three batches over a few days, and the first batch I just baked for too long. They baked flat and sort of crispy. That was because I didn’t decrease the baking time to match the size of the cookies I made vs the recipe. A rookie mistake!
The second batch, I baked them for less time, and they were still flat, but no longer crispy. These were good enough to pawn off on my sister.
The third batch, I decreased the temperature from 375 to 350, and kept the baking time shorter. This noticeably improved things. They still were flatter than I wanted, but they weren’t quite as bad as the first few batches. I’m not going to keep making dough and experimenting (at least for now), because I have other things to bake.
Having done this trouble shooting, I think the issue may be that I added too much chocolate to the dough. I was adapting Milk Bar’s Chocolate Cookies, which have their chocolate crumb in them. But I substituted an adapted milk crumb, which is coated in milk chocolate. And I added the whole batch of it (as opposed to half), to really load it up. But that means that there is a lot of chocolate in these cookies, and milk chocolate (which melts easier than darker chocolate) on top of it. I concluded that the chocolate is actually what was melting and spreading, and the cookie dough was taken along with it, because the ratio of chocolate to dough is so high. If I were going to keep recipe testing this, I might try:
- decreasing the quantity of the hot chocolate crumb
- using a darker chocolate
- taking out the hot chocolate mix from the cookie dough
- add cornstarch to the cookie dough
- continue fiddling with the baking time, and keep it at 350
How’s that for an answer for what I would do when faced with a mishap in the kitchen? Hope that better answers your question, Dr. Vesper… I’m using a bit of the scientific method even.
For now, I’ll share the recipe that I ended up on. I may end up continuing to test it next year!
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PinIngredients
Hot Chocolate Crumb
- 3⁄4 cup hot chocolate mix
- 1⁄4 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 tbsp. cornstarch
- 1⁄2 tsp. kosher salt
- 4 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
- 3 oz. milk chocolate, melted
Chocolate Cookies
- 16 tablespoons (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1/4 cup glucose
- 1 egg
- 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2oz milk chocolate, melted
- 1 1/4 cups flour
- 1/4 cup hot chocolate mix
- 1/2 cup cocoa powder
- ¾ tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp baking soda
- 1¾ tsp kosher/sea salt
- 1 recipe hot chocolate crumb
- 3oz jet puffed marshmallow bits
Instructions
Prepare the Hot Chocolate Crumb:
- Heat the oven to 250°. In a medium bowl, whisk 1⁄2 cup of the hot chocolate mix with the flour, cornstarch, and salt. Add the butter and stir with spatula until the mixture forms small clusters. Spread the clusters onto a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and bake until dried and sandy, 20 minutes. Transfer the clusters to a rack and let cool completely.
- Return the clusters to a bowl, break apart any that are larger than 1⁄2 inch in diameter, and then toss with the remaining 1⁄4 cup hot chocolate mix until evenly coated. Pour the milk chocolate over the crumbs and toss with the spatula until evenly coated, tossing every 5 minutes until the chocolate is cooled completely and no longer sticky. Transfer the crumbs to a container and refrigerate for up to 1 week.
Prepare the cookies:
- Combine the butter, sugar, and glucose in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and cream together on medium-high for 2 to 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add the egg, vanilla, and melted chocolate, and beat for 7 to 8 minutes.
- Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the flour, hot chocolate mix, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Mix just until the dough comes together, no longer than 1 minute. (Do not walk away from the machine during this step, or you will risk overmixing the dough.) Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula.
- Still on low speed, add the hot chocolate crumbs and marshmallows and mix just until incorporated, about 30 seconds.
- Using a 1.4oz ice cream scoop (or a 2.5 tablespoons), portion out the dough onto a parchment-lined sheet pan. Pat the tops of the cookie dough domes flat. Wrap the sheet pan tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, or up to 1 week. Do not bake your cookies from room temperature–they will not bake properly.
- Heat the oven to 350°F.
- Arrange the chilled dough a minimum of 4 inches apart on parchment- or Silpat-lined sheet pans. Bake for 14 minutes. The cookies will puff, crackle, and spread. It’s tough (kind of impossible) to gauge if a cookie that is this dark with chocolate is done. If after 14 minutes, the cookies still seem doughy in the center, give them another 1 minute in the oven, but not more.
- Cool the cookies completely on the sheet pans before transferring to a plate or an airtight container for storage. At room temp, the cookies will keep fresh for 5 days; in the freezer, they will keep for 1 month.