Earlier this month the Washington Post food section included a feature by Elinor Klivans on sandwich cookies, including three yummy-looking recipes. As I clipped the recipes for my files, I was reminded of the two Elinor Klivans cookbooks I own that have been sitting on the bookshelf for a while. I picked up Big Fat Cookies, a slim but satisfying volume whose contents live up to its title. The recipes are organized into three sections: "big chewy cookies," "colossal crisp cookies, and "two-fisted sandwich cookies."As I thumbed through the book, I came across a recipe I can't believe I never noticed before. Klivans's recipe for "chocolate chip cookies in a cookie" involves: 1) making chocolate chip cookie batter; 2) using some of the batter to bake crisp chocolate chip cookies; 3) letting those cookies cool and breaking them into pieces; 4) mixing the cookie pieces back into the remaining chocolate chip cookie batter; and 5) using the batter with the baked cookie pieces to bake more cookies. A cookie in a cookie? I thought this idea was pure genius. I told Tom about the cookie in a cookie and he pointed out that you could continue this process indefinitely, putting cookies in cookies in cookies, making something conceptually analogous to a sweet turducken, or a tur-cookie-ducken, as he put it. I couldn't wait to give the recipe a try.
The chocolate chip cookie batter isn't anything particularly special; it's made with flour, baking soda, salt, butter, brown sugar, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and chocolate chips. The first set of cookies I baked with this batter were fairly flat and crisp. I let the cookies cool somewhat, but even after about half an hour, the chocolate chips were still molten. I went ahead to break the cookies into pieces and mix them back in the remaining batter anyway -- I didn't want to be up all night waiting for the chocolate to cool completely. As a result, the remaining batter essentially became chocolate batter, because there was so much melted chocolate that got mixed in. This completely changed the texture of the batter. The second generation cookies didn't flatten much in the oven (I had to flatten the rounded scoops of dough slightly with my hand before baking to get them to take on a nicer looking shape) and were very dense and chewy, completely different from the flat and crisp first generation cookies. The picture at the beginning of this post shows the contrast between the first (on the right) and second (on the left) generation cookies.
Looking at the finished cookies, you would never guess that they had bits of chocolate chip cookies in them. For the most part, their dark mottled exteriors obscured their contents. But if you looked carefully after you took a bite (like in the picture below), you could spot bits of golden baked chocolate chip cookie inside. The overall taste impression was of a very chocolatey chocolate chip cookie.
While the finished cookie was a slightly above average chocolate chip cookie, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't spectacular -- I was so taken by the concept of the cookie in a cookie that I had sky-high expectations for it. If I make this recipe again, I will wait for the first generation cookies to cool completely before I break them up and mix them back into the batter, to make sure that I don't end up with chocolate cookies again. And this recipe has really started me thinking.... What other crazy cookie-in-cookie concoctions can I try? How about combining different types of cookies? How about brownies in a cookie, cookies in a brownie, or bars in bars? The sky's the limit!Recipe: "Chocolate chip cookies in a cookie," from Big Fat Cookies by Elinor Klivans.
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