Baked Sunday Mornings: Black Forest Chocolate Cookies

Hey, you. Yeah, you. Do you like puddles of chewy chocolate? The kind that are barely held together with a little flour, just enough to qualify as a cookie, but are mostly chocolate? Three kinds of chocolate, even? If any of that sounds like something you want to be associated with, you may want to stay a while. I have to admit that I was initially pretty indifferent about these Black Forest Chocolate Cookies from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking when they came up on the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule, but I quickly realized that my ambivalence was misguided. I am not normally a fan of Black Forest Cake, which usually consists of mediocre supermarket chocolate cake, whipped cream, and cherries swimming around in creepy, syrupy goo; however, we made Black Forest Cupcakes last year that surprised me in a good way, so I was open to giving them a try. It will never be my favorite combination, but as I said above, any chocolate cookie that contains this much chocolate should be in my baking repertoire.

The cookies are very easy to pull together, especially if you follow the exact directions and don’t make extra work for yourself like some of us who shall remain nameless, but who may have used chopped Valrhona Dulcey in place of white chocolate chips and chopped semisweet chocolate instead of chips, and also chopped down the dried cherries into smaller bits.

You’ll first melt a full pound of dark chocolate with butter, which you’ll add along with vanilla to a mixture of whipped eggs and white and brown sugars. I knew these would be rich because of the whopping 6 eggs in the mixture. Add the flour, baking powder, and salt, and rejoice in the deeply chocolaty batter that you have created! Finally, fold in the white and semisweet chips (or Dulcey and chopped chocolate if you’re one of those extra work-y people) along with the dried cherries.

I’m glad the directions were explicit in saying that the dough would be loose, because it was, indeed, much more like a brownie batter than a cookie dough at this stage. The batter will firm up in the fridge into a chewy, dense, intensely chocolaty dough that I seriously considered eating without any baking to speak of. After an overnight nap, I scooped the cookies with a tablespoon-sized scoop as directed, but these baked up to be rather unexciting and irregularly shaped, so I switched to a 2-tablespoon scoop, which yielded much more attractive cookies. The smaller ones took 10 minutes, and I baked the larger ones for 12 minutes, though they could have used another minute. The recipe yielded at least double the intended 24, even with the bigger size.

My favorite thing about the cookies is that they developed a crackly, flaky brownie top. I even wondered if I could pour the batter into a cake pan and bake it as a batch of brownies? Anyway, I liked them, as did my tasters. However, I would make two changes: 1) I’m not a big chocolate-fruit fan, so I didn’t love or need the cherries. The recipes suggests that for ultra-chocolate lovers, you can sub more chocolate for the white chocolate and cherries– I would be in the “more chocolate” camp without doubt, so I’d leave out the cherries in the future (which I realize means they are no longer “Black Forest”, but I’m willing to make that concession for more chocolate). 2) I’m not sure that I could taste the Dulcey at all, or that it made any sort of difference in the flavor of the cookie, so I don’t know that this is a good use of Dulcey. Because Dulcey is harder to get and costs lots of pennies, the expenditure may not be worth it here.

To get your chocolate-cherry fix, head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the Black Forest Chocolate Cookies recipe. Take a look at the other cookie-bakers’ wares while you’re there! 🙂

© Dafna Adler & Stellina Sweets, 2018.

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