My baking challenge has gotten even more challenging while baking during a pandemic when everyone and their mother is learning how to bake bread. Not only is yeast hard to find but now flour is also getting hard to come by. Luckily, I had enough in the jar to bake these yummy cookies. Funny enough, because of the Chocolate tart I baked a few weeks ago, I also had enough high quality chocolate to use for the recipe.

As this is my second cookie recipe I was pretty familiar with some of the techniques that Bouchon Bakery uses to make their cookies extra special. I gathered my dry ingredients, flour, baking soda, and salt and sifted them together into a bowl. OK, I didn’t sift them this time. I’ll admit that I ran a fork through the mix to make sure it was blended in well.

I combined the dark brown sugar and sugar with molasses. That molasses (just shy of two teaspoons) really added an extra layer of flavor to these cookies that helped set them apart from normal chocolate chip cookies. I’ll be remembering this trick!

I mixed it together until with was kind of smooth. Then I took out my two bars of Valrhona chocolate and started chopping it up into pieces. Now, I didn’t mention this previously but I actually went on a trip to France a couple of years ago with my sister and my mom and we toured the Valrhona chocolate factory. OK, I’ll be honest, we mainly toured the gift shop, but I brought back a lot of cooking chocolate on that trip. However, these particular bars of chocolate were purchased here in the good ole USA in Sur La Table for $13.00 each. Yep, you read that right. I used the remaining 40% chocolate and chunked it up.

Then I ruined it by using Kroger brand semi-sweet chocolate chips for the chip portion of this recipe. Hey, we’re in a pandemic here! I can’t go running out to the store for high quality chocolate chips!

Next up was pommade-ing the butter. I have gotten to be a pro at this technique! I warm up my glass mixing bowl, with the butter in it over the flame of the gas stove top. I do NOT sit the bowl down. That would melt the rubber on the bottom of the bowl that fits it into my mixer. You really just want to warm the bowl so that when you whip that butter for three to four minutes it turns into the consistency of mayonnaise.

This makes such a huge difference! When you mix your sugars into that whipped butter it gives the words light and fluffy new meaning! Add your eggs, mix, and then you’re ready to add in your dry ingredients. Once that’s mixed add in your chocolate chips and chunks and vôilá! You have some extremely delicious cookie dough.

If I had only known this dough would only make 2 dozen cookies I’d have made more! Now, Bouchon wants you to make 6 very large cookies with this dough. Can you imagine? Although, I could certainly eat that humongous cookie, I think my family would have a cow that they only got one cookie each. It’s a psychological game we play with our baked goods. I use a one inch cookie scoop and made two dozen. Still not a lot of cookies but better than six.

I pop them in the oven and they are truly pretty looking cookies. They spread evenly, puff up the way they are supposed to and when they cool? Devine! Slightly chewy with a tang from that small bit of molasses. The chocolate taste? Yum!

This is an easy to make recipe and one that I will definitely return and bake. I will NOT be using $13 bars of chocolate, but I’d imagine it will still be just as good with a normal bar of 40% Hersheys or Ghiradelli chocolate.

I did not purchase anything extra for this recipe and used what I had in the house. I even had the molasses because I love to make gingerbread at the holidays, so the cost of this one was cheap. $0

I didn’t learn anything new but I was able to go back and use the pommade technique and I feel like I’ve gotten very good at that and can incorporate that into some future baking.

If you’d like to purchase this cookbook, here’s a picture and click the link below to go to it’s listing on Amazon.

Happy Baking!

Deb

Bouchon Bakery (The Thomas Keller Library)