Straight from the hearth
Baking cookies can take you back and forth
Greetings from the COVID-19 Pandemic Test Kitchen, furlough No. 2 edition.
I'm practicing social distancing in my temporary unemployment under the spell of the oven again. By now, I've baked a strawberry cake with cream cheese icing for my best girl's birthday. Look for that recipe when I get back.
Last furlough, I started out baking cakes, and ended up in cookies. Played around with pudding poke cakes, which had me lingering around the Jello shelves. So, of course the butterscotch sirens start with the singing. Chocolate is just sitting there next to it, comehithering like the girl never short of dance partners that it is.
Wouldn't they make a fine cookie, cried my inner 5-year-old.
Then I remembered seeing butterscotch chips, and I'm helpless. Butterscotch is a sweet, sweet spring-loaded steel rod slowly snapping across my spine in bite-sized increments.
I'm far from an expert baker, but I am an unabashed optimist with a sturdy oven. Published a lot of recipes over the years, but precious few for cookies. My Quadruple Chocolate Knuckle-Sandwich cookies are among those.
That long-form exercise requires extra time, patience and specialty tools on back order on Amazon.com, which inspired me to simplify the cookie and harmonize it with butterscotch.
Shiny new baking project, engage:
Those butterscotch chips, were they up aisle or down aisle?
A chance glance to the floor reminded me in yellow tape I was on the wrong end of a one-way aisle.
That the butterscotch spell was stronger than my sense of propriety was made clear when I straightened my PPE mask, tightened my latex gloves, waited for my glasses to
defog then stealthily did
the COVID-19 prance the wrong way on what was thankfully (and miraculously) an empty baking aisle.
A canister of premium baking cocoa also caught my eye, and the project was off and running. Trimmed about four steps and an hour or more melting and cleaning up after three kinds of chocolate by using cocoa. It also added a welcome spicy
after-burn that would play well with a topping of flaky salt, if you're so inclined.
In what feels like an abandonment of my inner child, I'm recommending these for second-day cookies. Since I was strong enough to shove a stool across linoleum, cookies fresh from the oven have owned a time-share too cheap to let go in my soul. But these cookies from cocoa I'm cuckoo for were blindingly sweet right out of the oven, and the culprit was my beloved butterscotch chips.
Melted, they shone too sweetly. Once set, the butterscotch chips mellowed and hummed with the chocolate.
Didn't think to try before I gave away most of the cookies, but I reckon if you dunked a couple of them in cold milk and let them sit long enough you might just end up with pudding made in reverse. If anyone tries it, let me know how it turns out.
Chocolate Cocoa Butterscotch Chip Cookies
• 2 sticks unsalted butter,
melted and cooled to room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups golden or light brown sugar
• 1 egg plus 1 egg yolk
• 2 tablespoons milk, half and half or cream
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour • 1/2 cup premium baking cocoa
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 12 ounces butterscotch chips
Sift together flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking soda and baking powder in a medium bowl.
Whisk together the eggs, milk and vanilla in a small bowl.
In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar with a hand-mixer on medium speed until fluffy and light, 2 to 3 minutes.
Beat in the egg mixture, another 2 minutes.
Gradually add the flour mixture, and mix at lower speed.
Fold in the butterscotch chips until evenly distributed.
Use an ice cream scooper to portion cookie dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheets. Wrap sheets in plastic and refrigerate or freeze at least 1 hour. I froze some dough for about three days with no ill effects.
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Unwrap one sheet at a time and bake cookies 15 to 17 minutes. Remove and cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes; slide parchment onto a wire rack and cool to room temperature before eating with cold milk.