Double Chocolate Cookies with Fleur de Sel
There are several reasons why I haven’t done much baking recently. A major contributing factor is that it’s been summer, and having the oven on even long enough for a batch of cookies is completely undesirable. The motor of my electric mixer petered out right before the summer as well, which is a major hinderence since I’m not apt to cream butter and sugar by hand. As the temperatures have been cooling off slightly and my motivation for the sweeter-spectrum of things has picked up with stone fruits coming in season, I decided to buy myself a new electric mixer.
There’s been a lot of innovation in this whole electric mixer industry, I discovered, as I did a bunch of research on my new purchase. I was skeptical of the new digital technology as I was picturing a useless touch screen with no other benefit, but after reading a lot of reviews, I decided this was definitely the way to go. There are numerous benefits to this, but basically not only does it enable a “soft start” feature which won’t throw flour all over the kitchen, but it helps maintain a consistent amount of force to what you’re mixing by correcting for the resistance, something that you wouldn’t get with the normal transistors. I’m very happy with this new mixer, which I’ve been playing around with for several hours now. The model I bought is the PC digital one, because I pretty much swear by the PC line of anything kitchen related for its price and quality.
I’m always on the look out for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. This was an adaptation of David Lebovitz’s salted butter chocolate chip cookies and I must admit, they would’ve been much better with the addition of nuts, like he suggests. Still, it got me motivated to pick up some fleur de sel, which is a delicate sea salt that is just really nice to sprinkle on foods and desserts for a certain panache. The fleur de sel seemed to melt into the batter a bit more than I expected, so I think if I were to redo this I’d just sprinkle it on top as the cookies came out of the oven, but you can taste the different-saltiness of the grains when you bite into the cookie, so all is not lost.
- 1 stick unsalted butter (115g), room temperature
- 2/3 cup (110g) brown sugar
- 1/2 cup (100g) sugar
- 1 egg, room temperature
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/3 cup (180g) flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon fleur de sel
- 3/4 cup (100g) dark chocolate, chopped
- 3/4 cup (100g) milk chocolate, chopped
- Cream together butter and both sugars, then mix in the egg and vanilla until smooth and creamy.
- Sift together flour, baking soda and both salts and mix into the wet ingredients.
- Fold in the chopped chocolate until well combined and then chill until firm.
- Preheat then oven to 350 degrees with the rack positioned in the middle.
- Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Roll the dough into 24 one inch round balls and place on the baking sheets, pressing down with your hand to flatten.
- Bake until lightly browned around the edges, about 12-15 minutes. Cool slightly before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
Now that my kids will resume with school, baking bakies will for them is expected. Thanks for the recipe. This will be handy
Sorry, I meant baking cookies (Lol)
Back to school bakies has a nice ring to it though ;)