Black Cocoa/White Chocolate Remix: Cookies and Cream Cookies (Black Cocoa Cookies with White Chocolate Chunks)

A few months ago I made -- and fell in love with -- Edd Kimber's Salted Black Chocolate Sables with Caramelised White Chocolate Chunks. Then I happened to come across a recipe on Erin Clarkson's blog Cloudy Kitchen for what seemed like a similar cookie also made with black cocoa and caramelized white chocolate: Cookies and Cream Cookies. But as I read through the Cloudy Kitchen recipe (which is actually reprinted from The Cookie Collection, published by the folks at Bake from Scratch magazine), I realized that it has some significant differences from Edd's. Edd's sables are shortbread cookies that do not contain eggs, and the dough is formed into a log that must be chilled and sliced into cookies before baking. The Bake from Scratch cookies also require chilling before being baked, but they are drop cookies that can be scooped. And they have a significantly higher ratio of sugar to (flour + cocoa powder). I had to give them a try.

I don't normally keep black cocoa on hand, but I happened to pick up a bag at the liquidation sale of the Sur La Table in my neighborhood (it's now permanently closed and it's a bummer that I no longer have a kitchen supply store within walking distance; while there is a Crate & Barrel a few blocks from my house, it's heavy on furniture and short on anything I actually need). The recipe is straightforward: you cream softened butter with sugar and dark brown sugar; add an egg and an egg yolk, followed by vanilla paste; incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, black cocoa powder, baking powder, kosher salt, and baking soda); and stir in white chocolate. Erin recommends a mix of white chocolates and I used a 50-50 mix of white chocolate (Cacao Barry Zéphyr) and caramelized white chocolate (a combination of Cacao Barry Zéphyr Caramel and Callebaut Gold).

I used Erin's cookie scoot technique to nudge the cookies with a metal cookie cutter into tidy round shapes when they were fresh from the oven. I loved the look of these cookies. The color from the black cocoa is dramatic, to be sure, and the bits of white chocolate peeking out on top were a sharp contrast. I also loved the way the cookies tasted. The cookie was chewy and chock full of white chocolate that had melted into big, flat strata inside each cookie (Callebaut Gold pistoles are roughly the size of regular chocolate chips, but the two Cacao Barry chocolates I used come in wide pistoles that melt into flat puddles). You could definitely taste the white chocolate in this cookie.

As I considered the difference between this cookie and Edd's sables, it was impossible to pick a favorite -- but the two cookies offer very different experiences. Not just because Edd's have a buttery, sandy texture and these cookies have a crisp-outside-chewy-inside texture. The fact that these cookies were generously stuffed with huge pieces of white chocolate made the overall flavor different than the sables, which had much smaller bits of chocolate (due to the fact that the sables are sliced) that were far less prominent flavor-wise. Both cookies are delicious, but this one definitely seems more like a cookie jar type of cookie, while Edd's seems a bit more sophisticated, like something you might serve at afternoon tea. I would eat either, any time!

Recipe: "Cookies and Cream Cookies" by from The Cookie Collection edited by Brian Hoffman, recipe here available at Cloudy Kitchen.

Previous Post: "Brown Is the New Black: Salted Black Cocoa Sables with Caramelised White Chocolate Chunks," April 29, 2020.