Admission time. There is one treat that I will not study because I don’t want to live with the costs of success. Fudge. Fudge is my bane. I have avoided drugs my entire life because fudge taught the lesson I needed to learn.
No heroin for me, thank you very much. No cocaine. No exotic “baths” with comely and eager triplets. And no fudge. My fear of the f-word is a big part of why Heritage Cookies Of The Old And New World has no section on bar cookies. That would have required me to develop a recipe for brownies. No. Just no.
Enter a certain someone who shall not be named.
“But what about fudge cookies? This isn’t as bright a line as you’re pretending! That high end cookie shop in the mall has this dense, ultimate-chocolate bomb thing? Not a brownie, and not just a double-chocolate chocolate-chip, but something dense, and smooth, and decadent, and… [sigh]. That’s got to be a heritage cookie too, right? They’ve been everywhere since at least the 1970’s.”
Oh. Bloody. Damn. 50 years. That’s long enough to count. And yes, I know the exact cookie that [Unnamed] was talking about. Gauntlet accepted. That’s the cookie we’re about to discuss.
But please. Please! Think twice before you read any further! Will your world really be a better place with a cookie like this inside it? With a recipe for that cookie? Sitting on your shelf or in your computer, biding its time and waiting in ambush like a crocodile in the weeds of your diet? If the answer is “No,” then do us all a favor and turn around now. This is a slippery slope, and once you get started, you’re doomed.
As always, skip to the bottom if you want the recipe without the discussion.
Where to begin?
Do me a favor. Go to your favorite search engine and look up “chocolate fudge cookies recipe.” My effort came back with One Hundred Million results in 0.78 seconds. Yours too? Now look a few over. I think you’ll agree that most of the collection is a mess, with way too many are simple riffs off the classic Tollhouse recipe. “Add some cocoa powder, or extra large chunks instead of chips, and you’ll have a whole new treat!!!” Uhhhh, no.
That said, if you dig through enough of them for other approaches, you’ll start to see some standard proportions where better bakers have all ended up.
- Cocoa powder in the dry ingredients, plus extra chocolate in the dough;
- Butter as the fat; and
- For every 4 ounces of fat (one stick of butter), something like 1 cup (5 ounces) of flour, a bit less than 1 cup of sugar (call it 6 ounces), and one whole egg.
That was enough to get started, but I had a few tricks of my own to include in the mix.
- We have discovered that made with oil deliver a cleaner chocolate flavor. That needed to be explored. Maybe melted butter? Or ghee?
- We like to enhance chocolate flavor with a bit of salt, a healthy hit of vanilla, a subtle addition of coffee flavor, and/or a bit of spice. The last one wouldn’t fit this cookie, but the first three had definite potential (and ended up in the final recipe).
- You can create different chocolate effects by adding chocolate flavor in various layers rather than higher volume. Cocoa powder, bloomed cocoa powder, chocolate in melted, grated, chopped, and chunky forms… All of that can significantly alter the result.
Experimental Results
I originally wrote this up as a blow by blow account of every experimental batch, but my lovely editors complained that it ran too long. Way too long. F-word cookies take some work if you want to put out a recipe worthy of the name. So what follows is more of a summary about the collected lessons learned rather than the process I followed.
It took several batches to really nail the balance between butter and oil. I started at 50/50, and even tried a batch made purely with clarified butter (ghee), but ended up with a cookie made from butter enriched with a hit of oil. It was the texture that suffered. Imagine diving off a board, and then finding yourself underwater without that moment of transition. It’s not something you’d think is important, but you notice when it’s missing. That was the effect we got from using pure fat in the dough. It was all parts fudgy inside, with too little surface crunch.
OTOH, regular, creamed butter was just too cookieish. Melted butter found the best compromise between just enough outer crispness combined with an especially fudgy interior. It also saved a few minutes of effort, and… You know what? Why bother with all that chopping when I could just melt the bulk of the chocolate into the dough?
Melting the chocolate! That turned out to be the magic trick that sets this cookie apart. Finally – finally! – the muse in charge of baking decided to spare me a peck on the cheek.
The rest of the development process took some time to perfect, but that was more craft than art. The very thing we don’t want to weigh this down with. So here is that promised shortcut list of lessons and observations instead:
- Blooming the cocoa powder in hot water or coffee doesn’t add enough flavor to be worth the hassle. Just sift it in with the flour and baking powder.
- Different cocoa powders might matter, but we did not do that experiment. We used a good dutched cocoa powder in every version.
- Chocolate chips pressed into the top distract from the cookie itself. Don’t bother.
- But chocolate pockets in the dough make a nice addition if you get the size right. Go with something larger than standard chocolate chips, but not as big as the commercial chocolate chunks. A little trimming of the chunks achieved my perfect compromise. This is in addition to the melted chocolate (see below).
- Use white sugar instead of brown. Chocolate clarity works better in this case than muddying the flavor in the name of complexity. And don’t use too much. Those Internet recipes typically used a full cup of sugar in a recipe this size, but we strongly preferred cutting that back by a full 25%. Closer to 5 ounces than 7.
- Do not skip the flavor enhancers, and particularly not salt. It’s a case where your
victims[ahem] consumers should end up saying, “Is that a hit of salt I taste? It’s surprising, but I like it!” Kate adored it. The vanilla and coffee should be much more subtle.
At Heart It Is All About The Chocolate
The chocolate you use in this cookie matters more than you’re going to think. I actually found that out by accident.
This effort involved so many batches in this effort that we ended up digging deep into the leftover supplies from other cookies. That meant different batches with different brands of chocolate, and the clear differences from one to the other surprised us all. So much so that I made a special trip to the Strip District for a different high-end chocolate to use in one of the final batches. And yes, it produced a different and correspondingly high-end result.
There is a full quarter-pound of melted chocolate in this dough, and it matters.
Don’t mess around. Just invest in and use a darker chocolate that you genuinely like to eat. But it is not a “darker is better” thing. The cocoa powder adds that extra edge all on its own. This is a case where “better is better.” It really is that simple.
Final Notes
All joking aside, the cookies kept surprisingly well in a tin. Even I hit my chocolate saturation point with this many batches, so they ended up getting snitched one or two per day. Not just by me, I hasten to add, which I know from the mix of compliments and curses that kept coming my way! In any case, the cookies were almost as good on Day 10 as Day 1. The recipe says a week, but that includes some general caution that wasn’t required in my own home.
Don’t try to make these extra large. They are plenty rich enough to deliver all the chocolate you want, and delicate enough to fall apart if you start to get physics and gravity involved. Those crumbs you see in the photos are not a coincidence. Balls of dough with a diameter of 1-1/2″ to 2″ across yield 2-3 bite cookies, which is just what you really want.
For whatever reason – and I haven’t figured it out – these cookies don’t tend to spread anywhere near as much as you’ll think they should. So feel free to pat the pieces down on your tray before baking, and expect to have little mounds of intensely chocolate goodness at the end. 50% spread rather than the normal doubling.
CONCLUSION
This may be the one cookie I really regret. Not because it falls below our standard. It doesn’t. It’s awesome. The problem lies in feeling like I’ve betrayed your trust.
Our work is to cookies what $80 bottles are to wine. Things that are rare, special, occasionally unique, and meant to be savored by those who appreciate more than just another treat. These? These are high end smack, not wine. Intravenous chocolate injections. Oh, you’ll enjoy the trip. Will you ever! But will you ever forgive me? That’s harder to say.
Enjoy! Just don’t say you haven’t been warned.
