Chewy Cocoa Fudge Cookies

When I woke up this morning, I felt it was time to take a crack at a new recipe. Today I choose this from Words To Eat By, a blog I discovered only yesterday. You can find the recipe here.

I wanted to refer to these as Chocolate Deathcakes (as in, Death by Chocolate, not that they taste like death), but I was vetoed on account of it being a rather unappetizing title. Oh well. These cookies are fudgy, a bit fragile, and have an extremely intensely chocolate taste. It’s the cookie equivalent of a truffle. The recipe’s author describes the ways in which you can change the character of the cookie by varying your add-ins, and I’m sure experimenting with that can yield a variety of delicious results. However, I liked mine as chocolate, and chocolate only. These also somewhat resemble Dorrie Greenspan's Bittersweet Brownies from her book, Baking: From My Home To Yours. Mmm.

Let it be noted that “chocoholic” is one of my least favorite words (and a made-up one, at that) of all time. “Chocoholic” implies that one will eat anything with “chocolate” in the name, and for an audience of such self-identified chocolate fanatics, this cookie may not be for them. Make these for the lover of chocolate who uses some degree of discrimination. For the true experience, do not use premade chocolate chips, and do not use semi-sweet chocolate. The cocoa taste is the star here – the melty chocolate bits throughout are simply icing on the cake.

Chewy Cocoa Fudge Cookies

Here are my notes:

- I used nonfat Greek yogurt to make the cookies richer, as opposed to using regular Dannon or some similar common brand. I’m sure they’d be fine with regular nonfat yogurt, though.
- If you want these to be truly fudgey cookies, do not use any nuts. Instead, use approximately 4 oz of bittersweet chocolate, chopped into bits.
- Dropping “level tablespoons” of dough on cookie sheets never seems to work for me, so I almost always roll them into rough balls by hand. My yield came out closer to 24 cookies than 28-30.
- I used parchment paper instead of cooking spray or silpats on my baking sheet, and it worked well.
- You will note from my photos that my cookies did not flatten out. One of the comments on the author’s blog suggests that this may be due to the kind of butter one uses. In all honesty, I liked having a little height to them.
- Cooking time was a major issue for me, probably due to the fact that my cookies did not flatten. If you find your cookies are rather on the tall side, be sure to add at least 5 minutes to their total baking time. I had to carefully monitor them, so make sure to give these your full attention.
- At least twice, I thought the cookies were done and let them set up on the baking sheet for a few minutes, only to find that they were still molten on the inside. This may sound terrible, but I tried one in this intermediate non-dough, non-cookie state, and it was pret-ty tasty. I figure there can’t be too much danger in that, as the dough contains no eggs. But I wouldn’t suggest leaving your entire batch that way.