So Many *More* Cookies

I tried two new cookie recipes this past month! One was a marriage of the most popular mass-produced cookie and the most popular homemade cookie, and the other was my second creation from the Flour cookbook.

My friend Leah, whose yearly Superbowl party has become a social institution, had sent me a recipe for Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies. She hinted strongly that I should make these for the 2011 Superbowl, and I gladly obliged in the spirit of contributing to the outsize excess of sporting-event foods. "Excessive" is the perfect adjective for these behemoth cookies.

The recipe couldn't be simpler: make dough for chocolate chip cookies, mold dough around Oreos (or, if you're feeling extra-indulgent [as I was], Double Stufs), and bake. The cookie dough took some effort to incorporate, as it is designed to be stiff enough to maintain coverage of each Oreo within. The recipe said to use two cookie scoop's worth of dough per Oreo, but I eyeballed the amount in the absence of a cookie scoop. I may have been overly careful in covering the Oreos, as I could only cover 20 of them instead of the recipe's estimated 24. I baked the cookies for the upper time limit given, and they still looked underdone when I removed them from the oven; fortunately, 5 minutes of cooling on the baking sheet helped them settle into a solid-enough, yet still soft and chewy, state. I'd call that an ideal cookie texture!

So, was the excess worth it? The dough was wonderfully chewy, and the textural transition from it to the gooey chocolate chips was seamless. The cookie portion of the Double Stuf had softened somewhat, and had that falling-apart chewiness of Oreo chunks in ice cream. The Double Stuf cream was warm and gooey like the chocolate chips, and some of it had oozed around the chocolate cookies to mix with the dough and chips. Each bite presented new delights, since you could be met with Oreo cookie, nuggets of chocolate, a rush of warm cream, or all the above. The cookies can stand on their own, for sure, but the few bites that I dipped in milk were over the top - in a good way, of course. I would have to rule in favor of bringing on the excess...and my fellow partiers must have agreed, since there were no remainders to take home.

After experiencing the above cookies' chocolate and cream overload, I decided that my next baking project would involve neither - so, enter Flour's ginger molasses cookies. Two parts of the recipe gave me pause. Joanne's description says that she wanted the flavors of non-spice ingredients to be evident, so she uses less cinnamon and ginger than one usually might. Yours truly the Cinnamon-Tripler was apprehensive. Then, one is told to roll quarter-cup balls of dough for baking! (No wonder the recipe's yield was only 16 cookies; I ended up doubling it for my potluck purposes.) I was worried about how the large balls would fare on my cookie sheet.

Well, I (predictably) tripled the cinnamon - my logic being that if my usual tripling results in three times the normal amount of spice, tripling an intentionally lesser amount should break even with that norm. Otherwise, I followed the recipe exactly. The dough came together very easily, and was fluid enough that the recommended four hours of refrigeration really was necessary. I then scooped out quarter-cup dollops of cooled, hardened dough and rolled them in granulated sugar. I initially placed 12 cookies on a sheet, but most finished edges ended up touching - so, I only baked 8 per sheet after the first round. The doubled recipe yielded 32 large cookies as expected. It is difficult to judge scale from the picture below, so imagine the cookies being a tad larger than a spread palm.

Unsurprisingly, Joanne did it again! These cookies were the best spice cookies I have ever had, beating Dancing Deer's beloved molasses clove delights for the title. They were slightly crunchy near the edge, and pleasantly chewy on the inside. The ginger and cinnamon flavors were happily assertive, but I could still taste the smooth warmth of the butter and the dark syrupy richness of the brown sugar and molasses. The sugar dusting provided the tiniest, but still significant, counterpoint to the nearly-savory nature of this spice cookie, and gave each cookie a very pretty glitter overall. The cracks in the dough also added to the cookies' appearance. I can't wait to make these again, maybe around the holidays.

I was at Flour's Central Square bakery the other day, where I saw small - as in, not from 1/4 C dough! - versions of these cookies. I think I'll follow their lead when I repeat this recipe, as the large size isn't necessary. Hopefully a slight adjustment of the baking time is all I'll need to make that successful. Thanks again, Joanne, for a real potluck pleaser!

Then, I ended my February cookie marathon with a known restaurant delight. I have discussed Finale's Cookies and Cream dessert here before, but I just had to order it again the other night. Finale has switched up the cookies since I last wrote! The preponderance of snickerdoodles is gone, and has been replaced with a similar number of fluffy, sugar-encrusted sugar cookies. Also, the original nut and raisin cookies have been ousted in favor of two stupendous milk chocolate walnut cookies. Both changes improve the overall dessert. My one complaint? You now get two miniature whoopie pies instead of one glorious full-sized treat. This ends up being less whoopie overall, though there is an advantage to being able to eat one in the restaurant and take the other home. I suppose that if I were really intent on enjoying as much whoopie pie as possible, I could buy a full-sized one from Finale's bakery counter...

Happy cookie-ing!