Macadamia & Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Macadamia & Chocolate Chunk Cookies

There will not be a recipe or post for The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies on my blog, ever. 

No chocolate chip brownies, no chocolate chip ice cream, no chocolate chip cake, souffle, pie, tart, cupcake, muffin, cheesecake, gratin, pasta, pizza, ramen, soba, udon… 

I’ve sworn off them. 

Why? 

Because they are ridiculously expensive for chocolates and are never of as good a quality as your bar of Cadbury. And for someone who doesn’t fancy cadbury, that is saying something. 

There will be, however, a recipe for The Best Chocolate Chunk Cookies and etc. 

I don’t care for chips. I want chunks. I want bold, obscenely sized, oozing lumps of chocolate in my cookies. None of those homogenous, wussy little clones because the good ones are pricey, and the cheap ones make me wonder why I didn’t buy a slab of Cadbury, or Van Houten, or Tudor Gold, or Lindt instead and hacked it up with a knife with enough gusto to make a butcher proud. 

Which is what I’ve been doing, and will be doing from now on. 

Have you seen the prices of those bars when NTUC, Cold Storage, Carrefour have them on offer? I could buy two of those 200g bars and I’d only get 300g worth of chocolate chips for the same price. The best I’ve seen was a 200g Van Houten hazelnut bar going for $2.60, which I used for this batch of cookies. 

If you’re like me who hasn’t wandered down the candy and chocolate aisle in the supermarket in ages for whatever reason, you probably should (with only the objective of purchasing baking chocolate in mind). 

Hazelnut Milk Chocolate

This is what I’m talking about. Real, chocolate blocks in my cookies. 

I’ve made variations of this basic cookie recipe a few times now and I’ve noticed that different brands of chocolates give different results. Cadbury’s Old Gold yields dark, melted chocolate chunks while the cheap Van Houten I used in this recent batch didn’t so much as melt as it stayed dry in the odd absence of noticeable chocolate fragrance. Not a brand I’ll be using in the future. I’m not fond of low cocoa content. 

Creaming the butter and sugar together.

What I love about these cookies are their high chocolate to nut ratio, so you get gorgeous mounds of cookies instead of flat ones, and this recipe is so incredibly simple, yields over 100 cookies and the best thing of all? You probably wouldn’t want to bag home anymore of Famous Amos’ stuff because you’ll be churning out equally crunchy, fragrant and light cookies with enough nuts and chocolates to shut up any fussy eater. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die of starvation. You won’t be chancing across a puny speck of macadamia, complaining about how stingy they were with the ingredients…because you’ll be solely responsible for all that maniacal chocolate-hacking and nut-roasting. 

I’ve always stayed clear of cookies, because they never turn out the way I want them to, or the way that recipes promise them to. I am a complete moron when I bake cookies. Or at least I used to be. 

Cookie Dough

Idiot-proof cookies, as I call them. 

Just try not to eat up the batter before any cookies are baked, and always, always store them in an airtight container. They will remain crispy for days, although why they should last that long is beyond me. 

Fellow Cookie Idiots, this is for you, and after you’ve made these addictive little babies, don’t forget to comment back here on your success so we can revel in the joys of having conquered the elusive cookie.

Macadamia and Chocolate Chunk Cookies recipe adapted from The Great Book of Chocolate by David Lebovitz

This recipe alone makes a ton of cookies, so feel free to bake half the batch and freeze the other half in plastic wrap or individual pieces for a quick pick-me-up for whenever you’re feeling down. David gives the ingredients in grams and cup measurements but I prefer weighing everything for better accuracy. One can never be too sure what exactly is ‘a cup of firmly packed light brown sugar’. I’ve reduced the amounts sugars and butter from the recipe (into numbers easy to remember), and there wasn’t any drastic difference at all. I also prefer my cookies in bite-sized pieces.

Makes about 120 cookies, 5cm in diameter when baked

Ingredients:

• 90g granulated sugar
• 90g light brown sugar
• 90g unsalted butter, chilled, cut into small chunks.
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 175g all-purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 200g semi-sweet chocolate, chopped (into however large chunks that make you happy)
• 130g (1 cup) macadamias, toasted and chopped*

Directions:

Preheat oven to 150C/300F.

1. Beat sugars and the butter together till smooth, using the back of a spatula or spoon to cream and mash the butter against the sides of the bowl. Mix in the egg, baking soda and vanilla extract.

2. Sift in the flour and salt. Mix the batter till most of the flour is incorporated. Streaks here and there are fine. Do not overmix.

3. Mix in chocolate and nuts.

4. Scoop teaspoon-sized balls (3cm in diameter), 3 cm apart, onto parchment-lined baking sheets or onto silicon baking mats.

5. Bake for 18-20 minutes until lightly browned and the centers are slightly soft still. Remove from oven and let the soft cookies cool till crisp on a wire rack.

The cookies will keep for up to a week in an airtight container.

*To toast nuts, all you have to do is to spread them out on a frying pan under medium heat to toast for about 3 minutes, shaking the pan now and then to even out browning. The nuts are done toasting when they are lightly browned.