This week we tackled the "Chocolate Chunkers". One look at the picture in her book, and I knew these would be good.
Do you get the same feeling when you look at my picture? Ha! Really you should get the feeling that these are the lonely specimens of baked dough that came out of the oven actually looking sort of like cookies. These were not the breeze that last week's Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops were.
Wait, what I meant to say was: I decided cookies shaped foods were passe this week and found Dorie's suggestion that these be crumbled over ice cream much more compelling, so I just skipped right to that part: crumbles.
First off: the chocolate roster. If I remember correctly there were at least 19 ounces of chocolate in this dough: 6 ounces of semisweet plus 1 ounce unsweetened melted first thing; 6 more ounces of semisweet, 6 ounces of milk or white and come cocoa powder added in later...dang! Dorie basically took a chocolate bar, threw some raisins and peanuts in there and melted it all together. Why I didn't think to do that before...
In which we meet the beginnings of a luscious cookie dough...
And somehow the luscious factor is cranked up even more...
So since I ate all that dough in the previous picture, do you think I could just make little piles of the mix-ins on the cookie sheet and come up with something yummy still??
OK, I'm just kiddin! That dough was in fact under all those mix-ins. A girl can dream though, right? Dorie says that once the chunky bits are in there will be more of them than there is dough. To say the least, dear readers.
At this point there was a hitch in our thus-far flawless plan. I had to be somewhere and there was no time to bake the cookies. No matter; Dorie assured me that the dough could sit in the fridge for up to 3 days. Several hours later I came back home, turned on the oven and pulled a rock-hard chunk of cookie stuff out of the fridge. 19 ounces of chocolate, remember. I basically had a giant Chunky bar (remember those?)...this did not bode well for me ending up with cookies. I decided to leave the dough out and bake the cookies the next day.
At the appointed time the dough was still not feeling like behaving, so I basically took a pile of dough crumbs and mix-ins and mashed them together as tightly as I could into cookie-type shapes and quickly put them on the cookie sheets before they could fall apart...or at least just before they fell apart in the oven.
The turtles knew something was wrong...
Andy wouldn't come near me...(he's hiding behind his plastic island with the plastic palm tree)
Abby gave me the turtle evil eye if there ever was one.(Am I starting a tradition with these turtle pics...is that annoying?)
Here we have a nice pile of Chocolate Chunker dough that has been warmed slightly and left to lie where it may. Oh, I was so frustrated...while this stuff tasted good, the few cookies I did end up with were ugly as could be. Wonder what I should have done after chilling the dough to end up with actual cookies that stayed together? Next time I'll plan for a time I can bake the dough right away.
Here we have a nice pile of Chocolate Chunker dough that has been warmed slightly and left to lie where it may. Oh, I was so frustrated...while this stuff tasted good, the few cookies I did end up with were ugly as could be. Wonder what I should have done after chilling the dough to end up with actual cookies that stayed together? Next time I'll plan for a time I can bake the dough right away.
In the meantime, where's that ice cream?
