Caffeinated Chocolate Espresso Cookies!!

There is a widely held belief that something is always baking in our kitchen. This isn’t too far from the truth. We have baked innumerable cupcakes heaped with a variety of fluffy buttercreams or crunchy glazes, two-tiered cakes of both the carrot and chocolate variety, many a pie filled with fresh fruits and dusted with sugar. But cookies, somehow, have fallen between the cracks. Maybe they seem somehow overdone, the perfect consistency of then elusive (and here’s where I get controversial, because that consistency is a yielding, moist chewiness, not a tooth-breaking crunch). And everyone can bake chocolate chip cookies, right? So really, it’s just not worth it.

Then, my friend Ailish sent me an e-mail insisting that I look at a cookie recipe on her favorite vegetarian blog, 101 Cookbooks. What sort of cookies merited an e-mail, I mused, as I double-clicked and opened the window. And then I saw them and all became clear: espresso cookies, filled with cocoa, chocolate chips, and whole espresso beans enrobed in a thick layer of chocolate. I might have squealed. It’s possible I foamed at the mouth. Then I frantically posted the link on Chloe’s facebook wall.

This was actually the second time making these, as I wanted a tasty gift for my dad’s birthday. The recipe is easy and the result is indisputably delicious. Due to a dearth of organic ingredients in our kitchen, we substituted the original recipe with more basic supplies. I doubt anyone knew we used Morton’s salt instead of organic fine-grained sea salt. The chocolate and espresso flavors come through strongly but don’t obscure the rich butter base, and the espresso beans add a pleasant and surprising crunch to an otherwise soft and crumbly mouthful. The end result is like a smooth shot of espresso: addictive, rich, and certain to keep you awake a few hours past your bedtime.

2 ½ cups whole-wheat flour

2 tbsp. espresso powder

¾ tsp. salt

¾ tsp. baking soda

¾ tsp. baking powder

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature

2 cups granulated sugar

3 eggs

1 tbsp. vanilla

¾ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

¾ cup chocolate covered espresso beans

Preheat the oven to 375.

In a medium bowl whisk together the dry ingredients. Set them aside and cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl. When they are well-mixed, add the eggs one at a time, then mix in the vanilla. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients. I strongly suggest not adding the flour all at once even though it’s tempting; it has the tendency to go all over the place. Finally mix in the espresso beans and chips, making sure that they are distributed all throughout the batter. You don’t want any one cookies to be lacking in espresso beans (or, for that matter, you don’t want any one cookie to have 10 of them…that poor person may never sleep again).

The batter will be very thick. Take your greased cookie sheets and drop dollops of the batter onto them. This recipe makes a lot of cookies-probably 3 dozen or so. They puff up quite nicely and if you don’t roll them into balls the tops will be a mass of craggy, aromatic chocolate, oozing chips and espresso beans. Cook them on the middle shelf for just 10 minutes. They cook quickly and are better under-done than over-done. They are wonderful right out of the oven, moist and gooey. But we’ve found that they’re equally delicious after being in the fridge for a week: dense, cold, and buttery.