Working Girl Cooks!

Mmmmmm......look at all that chocolate.....I LOVE chocolate. I would eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch, dinner, AND dessert if I could. I joined a group called Tuesdays with Dorie and we are supposed to bake something and post it every Tuesday from the cookbook by Dorie Greenspan called, Baking: From My Home to Yours.

This is my first entry: chocolate chunkers. They have unsweetened cocoa powder, unsweetened chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate in them. YUM!

I wanted to use some good quality chocolate chunks so I went to Whole Foods, they have a wide variety of chocolate from all over the world! As I was chopping up the chocolate it was so hard to resist just eating it right then and their. I snuck a couple of tiny pieces and popped them into my mouth. Mmmmm....bittersweet chocolate. It wasn't sweet so the power of the chocolate taste really took over as it slowly melted my mouth. No more! I told myself, wait until the cookies are done!

 

I melted the unsweetened and bittersweet chocolate with some butter and mixed it together with the cocoa powder and flour to create this luscious, silky dough. It was smoother, creamier than any cookie dough I have ever worked with. How is this going to be thick and solid enough to form little dough balls that will melt into ooey-gooey cookies in the oven? Maybe I screwed the recipe up? Maybe I should just eat up this dough and start over? I checked and double checked the recipe. Nope, I did it right. I forced myself to keep going and not drink this luscious chocolate silk straight from the bowl.

More chopping of luscious sweet chocolate. More temptations I had to resist. More sneaking of sweet tiny little chocolate morsels melting in my mouth. Mmmm.....the silky smooth sweet texture of white chocolate, and the sharp yet surprisingly sweet texture of the dark chocolate. I did not melt this chocolate. I mixed right into the dough. When baked, it will create creamy, melty pockets of gooey chocolate in the cookies. Yum, just thinking about it makes my mouth water.

I was not too sure about the last two ingredients I had to add too my scrumptiously chocolaty mixture. Dried fruit and nuts? But what if it takes away from my chocolate? I was skeptical about how nuts and dried fruit could be good in these cookies. But I added them anyway. I decided to use almonds and tried tropical fruit bits because that is what I had around the house.

As I placed the big, chunky droplets of dough onto the parchment paper I began to get excited. These are going to be yummy! I threw them in the oven before I could start eating the raw dough right off of the cookie sheet and then washed the bowl (after licking it clean of course!).

I only baked them for ten minutes, the minimum amount of time the recipe says because I wanted them to be really gooey! They came out of the oven looking so amazingly good! The outside coat was dry and a little crackly with tons of gooey pockets of melty, melty chocolate.

The inside was absolutely soft and moist. I impatiently waited for them to cool. Wishing I could just gobble them up right as they came out of the oven. After ten minutes I couldn't wait any longer. I placed two cookies in front of me with a glass of milk. Mmmm....they were a gooey and soft as they looked. And wow were they chocolaty! A little overpoweringly so. There was a bit too much bitter and not quite enough sweet. The nuts and fruit were surprisingly good in the cookie, however, they gave it texture and crunch. I savored each bite, absolutely melting with love every time I bit into one of the gooey white chocolate pockets. Two cookies was all I could eat, the chocolate was too overpowering for my taste buds! I had no idea that could be possible! The chocolate in these cookies are so intense, you really can't eat too many!

I sent the rest with my husband to work. They got a great response, everyone loved them and they were gone in a day! Thank you Claudia of Fool for Food for choosing this recipe!