Baked Sunday Mornings: Campfire Cookies

This week's Baked Sunday Mornings recipe is the Campfire Cookie. With graham crackers, chocolate chips, honey, and homemade marshmallow, these are basically s'mores in cookie form.

I decided to go ahead and make the homemade marshmallows for the recipe. While the marshmallow recipe isn't difficult (and I'll discuss it in detail whenever Baked Sunday Mornings gets around to the "Chocolate Rice Crispy 'Cake' with Homemade Marshmallow 'Icing'" recipe in the book), I'll just say that I don't think it was worth the trouble. These cookies require only 50 grams of marshmallows, and even though I made a double batch of cookies, I still needed only a small fraction of the yield from the marshmallow recipe. It would have been so much easier to open a bag of Kraft mini-marshmallows instead.

Anyway, once I had my homemade marshmallows cut to proper size (and I had to make them a day in advance to have enough time to allow the marshmallows to set), the cookies came together easily. You cream butter with sugar and brown sugar; add egg, honey and vanilla; incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, and crushed graham crackers); and then mix in chocolate chips and marshmallows. The dough needs to be chilled before baking so I stuck my dough in the fridge for 24 hours.
The recipe says that you should use a two-tablespoon scoop to portion out the dough and that it yields 36 cookies. I think the stated yield is overly ambitious, because I used a #24 scoop (which is about two and two-thirds tablespoons), and my double batch of dough yielded only 41 cookies. While a few of the cookies retained a neat round shape while baking, most of them ended up with irregular borders because the marshmallows melted in the oven, creating lace-like patches of hard caramel.

This is one of the few times I didn't mind cookies coming out with misshapen edges, because the sweet and crunchy melted marshmallow is the best part of the cookie. In that respect, this cookie reminded me a lot of Christina Tosi's Cornflake-Chocolate Chip-Marshmallow Cookie, which has the same delicious hard bits of melted marshmallow.

Flavorwise, the campfire cookies were delicious, with one big exception -- I thought there was way too much cinnamon. I personally have never liked the combination of chocolate and cinnamon, and I thought that the cinnamon was overpowering (and also out of place -- after all, people generally make s'mores with honey grahams, not cinnamon grahams).

The cinnamon flavor did fade over time -- by day two and three, I liked the cookies much better. But in the future, I would just leave the cinnamon out altogether. The graham flavor in the cookies is subtle -- essentially, these are a hearty chocolate chip cookie with those wonderful bits of melted marshmallow. These cookies will never win a beauty pageant, but they satisfying and delicious -- marshmallow blemishes and all!

Recipe: "Campfire Cookies" from Baked Occasions by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Post: "The Cookie With a Caramel Secret Inside: Cornflake-Chocolate Chip-Marshmallow Cookies," April 29, 2012.

Comments

Unknown said…
I also made my own marshamllows and while its nice to do it on your own, I agree that for this recipe , store bought would be just fine!
erinstar41 said…
I loved the cinnamon in these - I always try to use cinnamon sugar grahams when making smores. I also added graham chunks along with the graham flour for a more pronounced flavor. I LOVE these cookies! :)
I liked the cinnamon in these, but I agree that they shouldn't be in a s'more's cookie. I tested the rice crispy cake and my marshmallows did not turn out the first time, so for this recipe I bought them!