Bean

Deconstructed Chocolate Chip Cookies

by:
December 14, 2009
4
1 Ratings
Deconstructed Chocolate Chip Cookies
  • Serves 2.5 doz
Author Notes

I've turned chocolate chip cookies inside out and created salted almond cookies with dark chocolate ganache sandwiched in between. Crunchy and grown up, and kinda decadent they were the hands down favorite last year. You can absolutely cheat and use Nutella if you don't want to make ganache, but they will be sweeter. I can't remember where I found the first recipe, I think it was about 7 yrs ago in the Times in an article about the best chocolate chip cookies, and there was a recipe featuring peanut butter dough, which I switched to almond butter, I have a piece of butter stained paper with the dough recipe from last year, but not so sure where it came from. —Aliwaks

What You'll Need
Ingredients
  • Cookie Dough
  • 12 ounces unsalted butter, best you can get your hands on
  • 3 cups Flour
  • 1 Vanilla bean, scraped
  • 1.5 cups raw sugar
  • 3/4 cup packed Dark Brown (muscavado) Sugar
  • 2 tsp salt, fine
  • 1.5 teaspoons baking soda
  • 6 tablespoons roasted almond butter
  • 1 lightly beaten large egg
  • 2 tablespoons fleur de sel (optional)
  • 1 cup chopped dark toasted almonds (optional)
  • Chocolate ganache (can be done the day ahead)
  • 8 ounces Best quality dark chocolate, chopped
  • 3/4 cup heavy cream
  • 1 vanilla pod
  • 1 tablespoon cognac or rum or brandy or frangelico
Directions
  1. Cookie Dough
  2. Melt butter & vanilla in heavy bottomed sauce pan, add flour cook till light brown, this process is somewhere between a pate choux and roux, set aside, let cool.
  3. Pre -heat oven to 350
  4. In food processor, process sugars, baking soda, almond butter, salt till smooth and creamy
  5. add egg, process again to incorporate
  6. add roux, process again till fully incorporated.
  7. Dough maybe sticky or oily , if so you can refridgerate a bit, but it's not necessary,
  8. cover baking sheet with parchment or silpat, drop well rounded teaspoons of batter about 1" apart.
  9. Sprinkle a few grains of fleur de sel on top of half the cookies (these will be the top half of the sandwich) bake 12 -13 min.. watch carefully till brown at edges, cool,
  10. When cookies are cool, spread some of ganache on the bottom of 1 cookie and top with second cookie ( the one with fleur du sel on top) You can take this 1 step further and really fill the cookies with ganache then roll edges in chopped toasted salted almonds
  1. Chocolate ganache (can be done the day ahead)
  2. Heat cream with vanilla bean till almost simmer, remove from heat let steep 20 min.
  3. Bring cream back up to simmer, remove vanilla bean strain over chopped chocolate (Make sure chocolate is in a very clean very dry bowl)
  4. mix together, add liquor, mix again, let cool slightly till easily spreadable
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9 Reviews

Aliwaks
Aliwaks December 20, 2009
Oh my goodness.. so sorry. I made it a point to follow the recipe amounts when I made them earlier this week. Did you sift the flour? I cooked it at least 3-4 minutes, stirring. The batter can be oily too depend on your almond butter. Did you bake them? hoe did they come out. My walnut batch were really really oily but came out fine.
 
donnaweaves
donnaweaves December 21, 2009
I did not sift, I cooked longer than 3 - 4 minutes, used commercial almond butter and the batter came out just like sand! it wouldn't hold together to drop individual cookies, so I just pressed it into the bottom of a pan and baked that, and then spread chocolate on top. Very good tasting, but a tough, crumbly texture.
 
Aliwaks
Aliwaks December 21, 2009
Donna..i don;t know, like I said I made it a point to follow the recipe and my flour/butter mix was soft and sort of blond color and it stayed together...maybe because I sifted the flour? I was making 3 different cookies all at the same time and presifted all the flour then measured for each batch. Maybe next time process longer in the food processor? I wish I had time to make them again so I could figure this out. also these were crunchy at first then softened up a bit after a day.
 
donnaweaves
donnaweaves December 20, 2009
I tried these yesterday and ran into some real challenges with the batter - it came out grainy/sandy and just couldn't be dropped by spoonsful - what did I do wrong? Can you give us an amount of time to cook the roux? Mine really never changed color at all.
 
Aliwaks
Aliwaks December 19, 2009
Maria.. this year I made my own, actually used hazelnuts, because I could not find the jar of almond butter I could have sworn was in the back of the pantry, somewhere near my ridiculous jam collection, so I toasted a few handfuls of hazelnuts. crushed them and ground them with about a half a tablespoon of walnut oil (sadly I have no hazelnut oil, a tragedy, I know)..I ground them up in my Magic Bullet Blender, because my Cuisinart decided to give up the ghost just that very day. It worked so well I made another batch using walnuts, and baked those with cocoa nibs, they too came out great.
 
Maria T.
Maria T. December 19, 2009
Look heavenly to me without the peanutbutter. But I live in Europe, in the middle of a huge almond growing area and I never heard of almond butter. Do you make it at home or is it store bought? Anyway, they sound delicious.
 
mariaraynal
mariaraynal December 18, 2009
These are genius. Almond butter, fleur de sel, vanilla bean, dark chocolate. Some of my favorite things.
 
Aliwaks
Aliwaks December 15, 2009
I'm making them tomorrow so will post a pic. as soon as they are done. actually going to try with hazelnut butter this year.
 
dymnyno
dymnyno December 15, 2009
I an almond or walnut person...no peanuts...this sounds very good...I hope that you post a picture sooon!