Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Please welcome guest blogger Stephanie from Life Tastes Like Food! Her blog is all about food, life, and all the wonderful happenings in between. You have to check out her posts full of gorgeous photos of San Francisco and Farmer’s Market bounty. Plus, if you’re looking for another cookie recipe, her salted Nutella cookies look amazing. She brings us her answer to the Chocolate Chip Cookie Challenge:

 

Hi Everyone! I’m Stephanie from Life Tastes Like Food, and it’s so wonderful to be on 52 Kitchen Adventures today! I was so excited when Steph asked me to write a guest post and immediately started thinking of some fun twists to making some delicious chocolate chip cookies. I’m a sucker for brown butter and good chocolate, so these cookies were a blast to bake.

I decided to chop up and combine three types of chocolate. Yes, THREE types of tasty, organic chocolate. The blend of chocolates create a more distinct flavor, and the addition of brown butter gives each cookie a slight caramel, nutty undertone. Delish.

First, start with grabbing some high-quality chocolate. I chose a combination of milk chocolate, super dark chocolate, and semi-sweet chocolate chips. This part is up to you. You can vary percentages of dark chocolate or try mixing different brands but using nice chocolate will set your cookies apart from the rest.

Then I chopped up the chocolate into fine chunks. I suggest chopping them the same size as an average chocolate chip (I ended up giving them a second chop after I took the picture below so the pieces were actually a bit smaller).

Then, set the chocolate aside and brown the butter. Brown butter makes your kitchen smell heavenly and contributes such a wonderful flavor to the cookies. See those brown speck in the batter below? That’s from the brown butter.

Then mix in your dry ingredients.

Stir in your chocolate chunks, and don’t forget to set some chocolate aside for the end!

 Stick the dough in the fridge for 10-15 minutes so it’s a little easier to work with when you’re ready to bake them. That’s all they really need though. This recipe is super quick!

Now, the best part of making these cookies is a little trick that I learned from Jessica over at How Sweet It Is. You scoop up a big ball of dough, then break it in half, and stack the two halves on top of one another! Genius! Seriously though, your cookies turn out perfectly amazing each and every time. I’ve made batches after batches of cookies with this method.

Recipe:

Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Adapted from How Sweet It Is
Makes: 1 1/2 dozen cookies or 2 dozen small cookies

• 2 cups + 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 12 tablespoons of unsalted butter, browned and cooled (see below)
• 1 cup brown sugar, only gently packed
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 egg + 1 egg yolk, at room temperature
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 oz super dark chocolate 70%, plus 0.5-1 oz for garnish
• 2 oz milk chocolate 34%, plus 0.5-1 oz for garnish
• 1/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips, plus more for garnish

(Again, the types of chocolate you use are up to you. Just make sure they’re high-quality.)

Brown Butter

Cut the butter into 1 inch slabs and add it to a skillet on low heat. Whisk the butter until melted, and then continuously stir by moving/swirling the skillet (keep it movin’!) until butter begins to turn a rich brown and brown bits start to float up from the bottom of the pan. This should take about 5 minutes. Watch the butter carefully because it can go from beautifully brown to burnt in seconds. Remove immediately from heat and let sit until cool (room temperature).

Cookies

1. Preheat the oven to 325 F degrees

2. In a medium size bowl, combine the flour and baking soda together. In a separate bowl, combine the brown butter and sugars with a hand-held whisk. Then mix in the egg + egg yolk and vanilla extract.

3. From there add the flour/baking soda mixture a little bit at a time and incorporate until a nice dough forms. (Once I added about half of the dry ingredients, I switched from using a whisk to using a rubber spatula.)

4. Fold in all of your chocolate (except for the amount set aside for garnishing).

5. Stick the dough in the fridge for about 10-15 minutes while you clean up a bit.

6. Using a scale (I highly suggest this) or a cookie scoop, scoop out about 2 tablespoons worth of dough and roll it into a ball. Then rip the ball in half. Place one half (ripped side down) onto a cookie sheet and then place the other half (ripped side up) onto the first half. Repeat for each cookie, leaving about 2 inches between each cookie on the cookie sheet.

7. Bake cookies for 12-16 minutes or until the edges start to get slightly golden brown. (Mine took about 16 minutes).

8. Immediately after you take them out of the oven, garnish your cookies with a couple chocolate chunks that you set aside earlier by pressing them into the cookie. This will make your cookies look full (and awesome).

9. Let them sit on the cookie sheet for 1-2 minutes and then transfer to a cookie rack and allow the cookies to cool completely.

10. Serve and enjoy!

Thanks again, Steph, for having me on 52 Kitchen Adventures!

Click here to learn more about the CCC Challenge and how you can participate!