Double Chocolate Cookies * cooking with cocoa powder

Double Chocolate Cookies

1 c flour

1/3 c cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/2 c plus 2 Tbsp butter

1 c sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 c chocolate chips

2/3 c. walnut pieces (optional)

Mix dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla, blend well. Add the dry mixture to the butter mixture, mixing well after each addition. Dough will be thick. Add the chocolate chips and mix in well.

Bake on lightly greased baking sheets at 350 Fahrenheit for 9-11 minutes. Makes about two and a half dozen.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make double chocolate cookies.

I found this recipe online while I was looking for something else, but it made something like five dozen cookies. I don’t need five dozen cookies. I halved the recipe and made a few tweaks, and the result is a more manageable two or two and a half dozen.

You make these cookies the same way you make ordinary chocolate chip cookies, but you use cocoa in place of some of the flour. The cocoa in question is unsweetened cocoa powder. Don’t substitute any kind of sweetened cocoa mix or the result will be horrendous. These cookies are plenty sweet on their own, trust me.

For this recipe you’ll need two mixing bowls, one large, one medium, and at least one cookie sheet. You can use butter and an egg straight from the fridge, but it’s a lot easier to make the dough when all the ingredients are room temperature, so if you think of it earlier in the day, take a stick of butter and an egg out of the fridge and set them on the counter. You’ll actually need two tablespoons more of butter than one stick, but I’m assuming that you already have some butter out next to the toaster.

In the smaller mixing bowl, blend the flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon with a fork or whisk. Be careful with the cocoa since it’s very fine and will poof everywhere if you try to handle it quickly. It’s hard to measure and easy to inhale. Once you get it mixed with the flour it will settle down some, though.

Set that bowl aside and put the butter and sugar in the larger bowl to cream together. This is also a good time to grease the baking sheets and turn the oven on to preheat. Once the butter and sugar are creamed together until they’re light and fluffy, add the egg and vanilla and mix them in well.

I’m going through this quickly because it’s so similar to my chocolate chip cookie recipe, which was our very first episode. If you need to brush up on how to measure flour or how to cream butter and sugar, listen to that episode because it walks you through the process.

Once you’ve mixed the dough except for the chocolate chips (and nuts, if you decide to add them), the dough will be extremely thick. You’ll wonder how on earth you can mix in those chocolate chips, but it’s actually not hard.

Place spoonfuls of dough on the cookie sheet. These cookies don’t spread very much so you can put them pretty close together without ending up with one big cookie. Pop the pan in the oven and set the timer for ten minutes, or nine if you made your cookies very small.

When the timer goes off, take the pan out of the oven and let it cool for a few minutes. You’ll notice that the cookies are a little puffed up when you first get them out of the oven, but they shrink and crack a little as they start to cool. After about five minutes or so, use a spatula to move the cookies from the pan to a wire rack if you have one.

Depending on how big or small you make the cookies, you’ll get between two and three dozen from this recipe, so it’s easier if you have two coo