This week, my boyfriend and faithful taste tester, Keith, requested cookies with coffee. Keith loves coffee - drinking it from the time he wakes up until after 5 pm everyday. Since I think coffee smells delicious but tastes absolutely awful, I have a hard time understanding how he can drink so much of it. However, I am surrounded in both my personal life and work life by a bunch of coffee lovers, so I decided to oblige him and make a mocha (coffee and chocolate) cookie.
To start with I checked my cookbooks. I found a recipe in the All American Cookie Book for a Mocha Cookie with White Chocolate Chips. It looked good in the picture and since I recently found I had an abundance of white chocolate, for some weird reason, I decided to try it. I didn't want to put chips in the cookies, so for a different look I thought I would try to dip them in white chocolate.
Well, I should have known something would not be right when I saw the recipe only contained 1/4C of flour. As I said, the cookies in the photo looked good, but when they came out of the oven they had a meringue cookie shell and gooey chocolate center. I took a small bite and the coffee taste was so overwhelming, I very nearly spit it out. But I decided to be a big girl and just down a huge glass of milk to wash the coffee away.
I set out to dip the cookies. Mind you, in all my cookie making experience, I have never dipped anything in chocolate. So I heated the chocolate in my double boiler and dipped the first cookie - it came out looking beautiful. Then I stuck in the second cookie and it completely fell apart. I grabbed the broken pieces out with a fork. The third cookie also broke into pieces. These cookies were very delicate. I ended up with a big pile of white chocolate covered bits.
The cookies were breaking apart so badly, that I decided to only try to dip half of the cookie (a black and white cookie look). Well, at one point I accidentally touched my finger to the chocolate and it was like lava. Come to find out this was the whole problem. The cookies were probably too delicate to dip, but the chocolate was also way to hot. I found this out by reading my candy making book, which says chocolate should only be about 85 degrees F for good dipping consistency. Here is what the first batch looked like.
When Keith tried the cookies, he thought they were wonderful. Basically the recipe contains the equivalent of 4 cups of coffee in 20 cookies - so you can imagine how strong the flavor was. He and I both took some to work to share and they were very popular.
I didn't like how delicate the cookies were and was ready to retry the dipping process. So I tweaked the recipe. The second batch came out much better. The consistency was like a normal cookie. Although they contained the same amount of coffee the flavor was less intense. I was able to dip them succesfully by heating the chocolate only to the melting point (I used the microwave this time) and then just let it sit on the counter while working. I only dipped the bottom of the cookies, as you can see in the picture.
These got very good reviews. Between my coworkers and Keith's, there were three complaints about less coffee flavor. This time, non-coffee drinkers also enjoyed the cookies. In fact, Keith took some to work and they were gone before he even got to have one. I was told by one taster that these were their absolute favorite and they wouldn't change one thing. It's nice to be able to make something others enjoy so much, when I couldn't even stand to taste it myself.
Now I just need to find something to use up the rest of my white chocolate stockpile.
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