25 June 2018
Recipe from The Perfect Cookie, America's Test Kitchen, 2017, p. 63
When I saw this recipe in The Perfect Cookie it reminded me of Chocolate Chubbies, an excellent cookie that's something between a cookie and a brownie. While I have been rather methodical in working my way through the cookbook, I skipped ahead to try this recipe, inspired by the goodness of Chocolate Chubbies and hopes for an even better version.
There were several striking elements in the list of ingredients. There was a lot of sugar (2¼ cups confectioners' sugar), a lot of pecans (2 cups), very little flour (2 tablespoons), and very little fat (no butter and no egg yolks). Creating the batter was straightforward. Dry ingredients (confectioners' sugar, cocoa, flour, salt) were mixed in a stand mixer. The wet ingredients were added one at a time: egg whites and vanilla. Finally, the pecans, which had been toasted and chopped, were added along with 1 ounce of grated bittersweet chocolate. These were baked, 15-18 minutes. I used a #60 disher which generated 33 cookies. Total time was 80 minutes.
My feelings about these cookies changed over time as I worked my way through the batch. (As with almost all cookies that I make, I freeze most of them, taking about a week's worth from the freezer once a week.) My first impression is they should have been called pecan cookies. Their flavor and texture were dominated by the nuts. Indeed, the batter was very thin and it was the pecans that held it together. The cookies were chewy, too, as advertised, but the chocolate flavor took a back seat to the pecans. The more I ate them, though, the more I grew to like them, to enjoy them for what they were rather than what I was expecting. Then towards the end of the batch my impression of them soured somewhat as I concluded they were too nutty for my taste. These were not much like chocolate chubbies where chocolate is the star, that is probably why I like them so much.
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