Share your best pandemic recipes: Here are some killer triple-chocolate cookies
Not chili. Not again.
We all have a recipe that we’ve leaned on hard to get us through this pandemic. Drew Magary, who writes about sports, parenting and profanity, has a somewhat-famous chili recipe that I’ve adapted for my own uses. If you really need to know, the secret ingredient is liquid smoke, among other things.
The recipe is good and it’s not complicated. But I’ve made it basically every other week for seven months. It’s time for something different.
Call it a recipe exchange or think of it as helping your neighbor out — a lot of us just want to eat something different. There are no prizes other than the satisfaction of a job well-done, and your mom might be proud of you for getting your name in the paper. Our team of recipe scientists (me and my chocolate lab, Daisy) will sample the goods and share any gems we find.
I’ll get us started with a crowd favorite, triple-chocolate cookies.
This recipe is a tweaked version of an alleged Nieman-Marcus cookie recipe that went around the Internet in 1996. Yes, I was using the internet back then. The recipe claims to be from a customer who paid $250 to get the recipe for the department store’s special cookies. It has been debunked, but the recipe itself is very good. It’s even better with some modifications.
Modifications have been made and specificity added. For all that’s good in this world, don’t substitute Nestle semi-sweet chocolate morsels and then tell me the recipe isn’t that good. Get Godiva milk-chocolate chips.
There are two keys to making this recipe:
1. Let the butter soften a bit. You don’t want it gooey, but it can’t be rock-hard out of the refrigerator. Take the butter out when you start to gather all the ingredients for mixing.
2. Cook the cookies for 10 minutes. They will need a solid 20 minutes to cool down before you take them out of the pan, because they are very soft and gooey. If you want them more solid, cook them up to 15 minutes. But 10 is where it’s at for chewy, three-quarters cooked sweets.
Now, let’s break out that Kitchen-Aid mixer.
Ingredients
1 cup of butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 cups flour
2 1/2 cups oatmeal that has been put in a blender and ground into a fine powder
2 extra large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 shredded/grated milk chocolate bar (4 ounces worth)
1 bag of milk chocolate chips
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons dark-chocolate peanut butter (I use Peanut Butter & Co.’s Dark Chocolatey Dreams, which is usually available at Target and local grocery stores)
Instructions
It’s a pandemic. We aren’t mixing the dry ingredients, then whipping the wet ingredients and then wooshing them together while watching Julia Child reruns. I’ve done this the hard way and I’ve done this the easy way; the cookies taste the same.
Put everything together in a heavy-duty mixing bowl and turn it on low and run for two or three minutes. It will get thick and clump together at the end. That’s when the mix is ready. If you have to mix by hand, add the chocolate chips at the end. It can be a difficult process but we’re all rooting for you.
Bake at 350 for 10 minutes
VARIATION: I also made butterscotch cookies from essentially the same recipe. Just omit the grated chocolate bar and buy butterscotch chips. Experiment with other chips and report your successes.
Submit your recipe
You can send your recipe to jpatrick@sacbee.com or just use the simple form below. Please tell us a little story about what you’ve been making and why it’s such a hit.