Dark Chocolate Espresso Cookies, Crazy for Cookies, Brownies, and Bars: Super-Fast, Made-from-Scratch Sweets, Treats, and Desserts by Dorothy Kern.
You can be a world-class cookie baker, making perfect-every-time cookies that everyone loves. It’s not a crazy idea at all, with Crazy for Cookies, Brownies, and Bars as your guide.
Author Dorothy Kern is one of the most trusted and widely read baking bloggers on Earth—and with good reason. Her tested-to-perfection recipes are easy to make, scrumptiously delicious, and full of creative new flavour ideas. In these pages, she serves up more than 85 recipes, each with its own colour photo.
Dorothy shows you how to make cookies in batches big or small and offers expert tips on how to store them so they stay fresh for a long time. What’s more, she guides you in taking your cookie skills in new directions, into the delectable world of brownies (lots of different kinds of brownies!), blondies, shortbreads, shortcakes, cookie cakes, and more. Her book includes cookies that range from traditional favourites to all-new concepts:
- Seriously the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Trail Mix Oatmeal Cookies
- Dark Chocolate Espresso Cookies
- Nana’s Drop Sugar Cookies
- Fruity Pebble Cookies
- Chocolate Peanut Butter Potato Chip Cookies
Beyond the cookies, you’ll love the recipes for:
- Brown Butter Pecan Blondies
- Cookies ’n’ Cream Mud Bars
- Caramel Crunch Bars
- Bacon and Caramel Brownies
- Vanilla Lovers’ White Chocolate Brownies
- Fruit Tart Cookie Cups
- Birthday Cookie Cake
…among tons of other delicious crowd-pleasers. Your family and friends will be thrilled with the results—and so will you.
It’s the definitive book on cookies—and so much fun to use!
Crazy for Cookies, Brownies, and Bars: Super-Fast, Made-from-Scratch Sweets, Treats, and Desserts is available at Amazon.com and Indigo.ca.
Dark Chocolate Espresso Cookies
Yield: 21 cookies
Prep time: 20 minutes
Chill time: 1 hour
Bake time: 12 minutes
Until I started blogging and teaching myself about ingredients and baking, I didn’t know that people often added coffee to chocolate recipes to enhance chocolate flavour. Sometimes the added coffee was meant not to be tasted but instead to bring out the richness of the chocolate—and all my life I’d been omitting it because I didn’t like coffee (until I started working full time and then it became my saviour). The espresso powder in these cookies does double duty: It accentuates the chocolate and adds a kick of coffee flavour to the recipe. I know it’s often hard to find instant espresso powder, so if you can’t find it you can substitute a dark instant coffee (like Star- bucks Via). But if you can find instant espresso powder, use that—it adds so much flavour to the cookies.
1 2/3 cup (262 g) bittersweet chocolate chips, divided (plus more for topping)
½ cup (113 g) unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup (150 g) packed brown sugar
¼ cup (50 g) granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large egg
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder
1 tablespoon (5 g) unsweetened cocoa powder
1 ¼ cups (155 g) all-purpose flour
Sea Salt, for sprinkling (optional)
INSTRUCTIONS
- Place 1/3 cup (57 g) bittersweet chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl. Heat on 50 percent power in 30-second increments, stirring be- tween each, until melted and smooth. Set aside to cool while mixing the cookie dough.
- Cream the butter and both sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fit- ted with the paddle attachment (or a large bowl using a hand mixer) until fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes. Mix in the vanilla extract, egg, baking soda, and salt.
- Add the melted chocolate to the mixture along with the instant espresso powder and cocoa powder and mix until smooth. Slowly mix in the flour until a dough forms. Stir in the remaining 1 1/3 cups (205 g) chocolate chips.
- Scoop balls of cookie dough (each about 2 tablespoons) onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Chill at least 1 hour.
- Preheat the oven to 350°F (177°C). Line a second cookie sheet with parchment paper. Space cookies 2 inches (5 cm) apart on baking sheets, using a third cookie sheet if needed. Bake for 11 to 13 minutes or until the cookies just lose their glossy sheen. The cookies will still be soft at this point, but they will set as they cool.
- As soon as the cookies come out of the oven, press a few chocolate chips on top of each hot cookie. Sprinkle with sea salt, if desired.
- Cool on the cookie sheets, and then store in an airtight container for up to 3 days or freeze for up to 2 months.
Tip :
You can also use Dutch-process cocoa or Hershey’s Special Dark unsweetened cocoa in this recipe for an extra dark punch of flavour.
Recipe reprinted with permission from Harvard Common Press.