[Cookie 025] Chocolate Crackle Cookies

Hey there readerz. I come to you to tell of a saddening cookie experience, or at least one slightly tinged with frustration. Okay, so everyone makes mistakes yadda yadda no one's perfect blah blah don't cry over spilled milk. But nonetheless, spilling too much milk into a labored-over batch of rich, Valrhona-y chocolate cookie dough still hurts my soul.

Alright, let's back up a bit. A few nights ago, my dad spontaneously suggested that we bake up some cookies, and I of course whole-heartedly agreed, despite my intentions to go to bed (yes, I've been going to bed at 10:30, whut!). We compared recipes to the ingredients we had on hand, and in the end decided to make the Chocolate Crackle Cookies that we had both had our eye on for some time. We had all the ingredients save some whole milk. Enter: potentially problematic situation.

We decide that since we had some leftover heavy cream, we would just whip up some whole milk by mixing the cream with some regular 1% milk. No problem! But we made 1 cup of it, when we only needed 1/6 cup! Fine. Shouldn't be a problem if we were careful. Needless to say, I was not careful, and promptly poured in about 3x too much milk to the chocolately mess.

I flipped! Seriously, I was very, very upset. My world came crashing down, and depsite my father's kind kind consolations, I still couldn't get over that I had essentially wasted a bunch of good ingredients AND an entire Valrhona 61% Cacao Chocolate bar. That's like throwing away holy water, or some other equally cherished item that could fulfill this lame analogy.

So instead of pitching the whole mess out, we decided to double the recipe, but omit the addition of more milk obviously. I think, in the end, we covered our butts quite well in fact. The cookies came out a little more like brownies, in my opinion, but they were still quite striking in appearance and who doesn't like brownies anyways, right?

One thing to note about the recipe: When my dad baked the first batch (obviously having doubled the recipe we had many batches to bake) he didn't roll the balls of dough in the powdered sugar enough. They came out not very white in the sugary areas, but if you make sure to fully coat the balls in the powdered sugar after rolling them in the granulated sugar, you should be fine. Be diligent! It is a tad time consuming and messy, but they look great if you spend a good amount of time on them. Really roll em around until they are thoroughly coated!

Chocolate Crackle Cookies

Makes about 5 dozen

Ingredients

• 8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted and cooled
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup Dutch cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 1/3 cups light-brown sugar, firmly packed
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/3 cup milk
• 1 cup confectioners' sugar, plus more for rolling

Directions

1. Melt chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring. Set aside and let cool. Sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.
2. With an electric mixer, beat butter and brown sugar on medium speed until pale and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Mix in eggs and vanilla, and then the melted chocolate. Reduce speed to low; mix in flour mixture in two batches, alternating with the milk. Divide dough into four equal pieces. Wrap each in plastic; refrigerate until firm, about 2 hours (I kept my dough in the refrigerator for a few days, baking batches when I wanted to, and this worked fine.)
   
3. Preheat oven to 350F. Divide each piece into 16 1-inch balls. Roll in granulated sugar to coat, then in confectioners' sugar to coat. Space 2 inches apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake until surfaces crack, about 14 minutes. Let cool on sheets on wire racks.

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{End Results}
Baking Difficultly: 3/5
Ingredient Accessibility: 2/5
Tastiness: 4/5 (Nothing all that different or special, but tasty)
Attractiveness: 4.5/5 (The white and black contrast* is really striking!)
Is it worth it?: Yeah, but do follow the directions. I'd like to know how they turn out with the correct amount of milk...

*Possibly distasteful/disrespectful side note: I went to Michael Jackson's Memorial service-- photos at my other blog and my Flickr