Good Food: Triple Chocolate Cookies

Another attempt at super-chocolatey cookies! This time I tried to recreate one of my all time favorites: Grand Central Bakery's Triple-Chocolate Cookies. In The Grand Central Baking Book, there is a recipe for these cookies, but it really requires a stand mixer. Not all of us have a stand mixer, though! I have a feeling that if you have a stand mixer and follow the recipe exactly, the cookies will turn out just like at the bakery. However, I've made this recipe us poor/space-challenged folks can use with a handheld mixer. I thought it turned out very well. Yummy, and the taste was right on... I suspect the only difference is that these cookies didn't puff up quite as much as at Grand Central.

4 oz. (4 sq.) unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped into chunks
10 oz. (1 bag) Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips
1 c. (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
4 eggs
1 and 3/4 c. sugar
1 and 1/2 tsp coffee
1 and 1/2 tsp vanilla
2/3 c. flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
2/3 c. semisweet chocolate chips
2/3 c. chopped walnut pieces (optional)


1. Melt the unsweetened baking chocolate and dark chocolate chips in a metal bowl over a pan of boiling water. Make sure it doesn't burn!
2. Whip the eggs, sugar, and butter together in a big bowl. The mixture should be fluffy! Add the coffee and vanilla, and mix a little more.
3. Combine the dry ingredients, then dump them in the big bowl with the wet ingredients. Mix just long enough until the flour gets incorporated.
4. Add the melted chocolate mixture and mix just until the color of the batter is uniformly brown.
5. Stir in the semisweet chocolate chips. And the nuts if you like them.
6. Let the batter sit for 45 minutes. It will set up and become the consistency of normal cookie dough. You have got to believe!
7. Preheat the oven to 350 and bake on parchment paper-lined pans for about eight minutes. Drop the dough on the pan in heaping spoonfuls. The cookies will not look entirely done at eight minutes, but leave them on the pan for a few minutes and they will continue to cook. Then transfer them to a cooling rack until they aren't warm anymore. Our oven runs hot, so maybe they will take a little longer in yours. But don't let them burn whatever you do!

-Kristin

I didn't like these cookies so much. I ate them, but that's only because they contained chocolate and I was desperate. Whereas Kristin thought the taste was right on, I thought it was right off. I can't pinpoint what was so funny tasting, but they were. Time to continue the cookie search, I say.

- Megan Leigh

Rich. I didn't think they were terrible. It was just a lot of chocolate in a sweet little cookie. Something between this cookie and the last kind of cookie would be best--not a fluff ball, not a condensed chocolate substance.

- Ben