CHOCOLATE COOKIES

WE HAVE EATEN ALL KINDS OF CHOCOLATE cookies. Many recipes are similar to the dough used to make traditional Tollhouse cookies, except that some of the flour is replaced by cocoa powder. For our chocolate cookie recipe, we wanted something completely different. The cookie had to be packed with chocolate flavor, both from the dough and from chips. We also wanted the texture to be soft and creamy. We really wanted these cookies to taste like a chocolate bar or truffle baked into the shape of a cookie.

Clearly, we would need to use melted chocolate for both flavor and smoothness. We experimented with semisweet and unsweetened chocolate. Semisweet chocolate was preferable, giving the cookies a better chocolate flavor and a smoother texture. Since we were adding chips to the dough, we tried melted chips instead of melted semisweet chocolate and liked the results just as well.

We encountered a recurring problem in our testing. We wanted to add a lot of chocolate, but the dough was very soft, making it hard to drop and causing the cookies to spread too much in the oven. We also discovered that this batter needed a lot eggs (we settled on three) to give the cookies the smooth, truffle-like consistency we wanted. However, adding so many eggs made the dough even softer.

Many chocolate cookie recipes suggest chilling the dough in the refrigerator to firm up its texture. We found that our dough required two hours to achieve a firm texture. We also discovered that the dough will bake up fine if refrigerated overnight.

Our recipe was almost perfect but needed some final refinements. We added some cocoa powder and liked the results. The cocoa adds an intense, slightly bitter chocolate flavor that balances the sweetness of the chocolate. We found that dutched cocoa tastes richer in this recipe than natural cocoa and makes the cookie darker. The vanilla extract enhances the chocolate flavor and we settled on using a full two teaspoons in our recipe. Although most recipes call for granulated sugar, we added some brown sugar and liked the rich, slightly caramel flavor it imparted.