Making the Reddit-famous Armenian Perok Cake left me with some extra egg whites and the opportunity to try a recipe that's been on my to-bake list for a while: Buttermilk by Sam's small batch double chocolate chunk cookies. The recipe only requires a single egg white and is supposed to yield seven cookies. I often ended up tossing my extra egg whites, so I was happy to try a new recipe using whites only.
Of course, I rarely end up with just a single extra egg white, and I had a few others in addition to the two I had from the perok cake -- so I decided to multiply the cookie recipe by seven! The recipe is straightforward except for the mandatory chilling time, so I made the batter a day in advance. You beat softened butter with sugar, vanilla and salt; add the egg white; incorporate baking soda, flour, and cocoa powder; and fold in chopped milk chocolate. I used Valrhona Caramelia, which is caramelized milk chocolate. It comes in large, flat feves, so I roughly chopped the chocolate before mixing it in. I chilled the batter overnight before scooping out the dough (I used a #24 scoop and got 53 cookies from my seven batches of dough), sprinkling the cookies with Maldon salt, and baking.
My cookies were beautiful. While they did not bake up perfectly round, they were very amenable to cookie scooting (shaping them with a metal ring while they are hot from the oven), so they ended up neat and round after I scooted them. Sam recommends using King Arthur all-purpose flour, so I did and didn't have any problems with the dough spreading too much.
These cookies were freakin' delicious. The flavor of the cookie itself was very brownie-like, and the Valrhona Caramelia was insanely good. The smooth, sweet milk chocolate-caramel flavor is heavenly, and I think that milk chocolate is definitely the right choice for this cookie. The cookie had a firm but chewy texture and it really just fired on all cylinders, with layers of complementary flavors in each bite that were all heightened by the hit of salt on top.
This is an outstanding cookie recipe, and the fact that it's a small batch recipe (that scales up well, yay for metric weights!) and uses egg whites only makes it extra useful -- so long as you have the patience to wait out the chilling time! It's so good that I might have to start making more recipes requiring egg yolks, just to create an egg white surplus!
Recipe: "Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies" from Buttermilk by Sam.
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