Good Morning! I think I'll start the week by linking to a seven year old article with three good looking cookie recipes -- Painted Cookies, Spice Drops and the Bill Yosses Chocolate Chip. The chocolate chip cookie recipe of the former White House chef is interesting in that it calls for hazelnut paste.
Bill Yosses Chocolate Chip Notes
This is an older recipe to be sure, but it's a good one. Plus it's one of the first I ever saw to use hazelnut paste as an ingredient. Note: hazelnut paste is not the same thing as Nutella. It's more like hazelnut butter, which is also hard to find. If you really love hazelnut flavor you can order it from Amazon. If you are okay with the cookies not tasting like hazelnut, you can substitute peanut butter or almond butter.
Update 2023
The first photo is an old one. I used chocolate chips out of necessity, but Mr. Yosses specifically points out that the dough is basically just a vehicle for the chocolate chunks and that you need to use a lot of chocolate. Check out the photo below, which I packed with chocolate.
As for the hazelnut paste or hazelnut butter, both are a little easier to find these days, but hazelnut paste is still a special order. In my opinion you need to use an oily hazelnut paste that's more for baking than spreading such as this one. The ratio of butter to everything else in this recipe is relatively low compared to other chocolate chip cookie dough recipes, so that ¼ cup of hazelnut paste is acting as a flavoring and fat. But as mentioned, an oily unsweetened peanut butter works well too. You just get some peanut flavor.
Egg Size
Another thing I started doing with this recipe is holding back some of the egg. I crack 2 large eggs, mix them together and add 80 grams rather than 100. It sounds nitpicky, but sometimes using less egg gives you a crumblier, dense, less cakey texture. Dialing back the eggs just gives the cookies a better, denser, crumblier texture. If you feel like your dough is too dry without that missing 20 grams of egg, you can add it back.
Cookie Size
The yield is supposed to be 4 dozen cookies, but I've always made them bigger than that. And by bigger I mean up to 3 oz each for a yield of about 12. The funny thing is my idea of a big cookie is 3 oz and now people are making cookies that weigh 7 oz! The cookies are good big or small.
Recipe
Bill Yosses Chocolate Chip
Ingredients
- 4 oz unsalted butter, room temp (114 grams)
- ½ cup granulated sugar (100 grams)
- 1 cup light brown sugar (200 grams)
- ¼ cup unsweetened hazelnut paste or peanut butter (64 grams)
- 2 large eggs (100 grams or just use 80 grams)
- 2 large vanilla beans or 1 teaspoon good vanilla extract seeds scraped out
- 2 ⅓ cups all-purpose flour (310 grams)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 12 oz chopped chocolate or chocolate chunks or more!
Instructions
- In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter and both sugars until creamy. Beat in the hazelnut paste until smooth, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat in the scraped vanilla beans (or just use 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract).
- In a second bowl, thoroughly mix together the flour, baking soda and salt. Gradually add the dry mixture to the wet, stirring until blended. Stir in chocolate chunks.
- Cover the dough with plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes OR shape into balls, put on a plate, cover and chill until ready to bake.
- Preheat the oven to 375 F. Line baking sheet with parchment paper. Using a large cookie scoop, drop dough onto a large parchment lined baking sheet if you haven't already portioned the dough. You can make 4 dozen small cookies or 12 giant ones.
- Bake until lightly browned, 9-13 minutes for small cookies and up to 22-24 if you make large 3 oz cookies.. Cool the cookie sheets on a cooling rack before removing the cookies.
Sue says
I love this discussion. I often make dough and put it in the freezer for when I actually need it, because fresh baked is hard to beat. That said, I also have made cookies and frozen them and no one has ever complained. We have a regular freezer in our basement. By regular, I mean not frost free. I think frost free freezers, with their cycling to keep them frost free are much harder on food, but I don't really have any science to support that. It's just my own opinion. I do know that food in our regular freezer keeps longer than food in our refrigerator frost free freezer.
Katrina says
Jen, my aunt always brought us a BIG basket of baked goodies every Christmas. I totally thought she bought them and assembled baskets with tons of different kinds of store bought cookies. Come to find out she always baked them all (I never thought she was the baking type)! Her cookies were always SO good and she told us that she'd start baking and freezing at Thanksgiving to get it all done. Now, as a true "baker" myself, I would probably look back and notice some of the cookies had a bit of that freezer taste or weren't as good as they could have been, but if you make yummy things, people don't seem to notice or care (unless they are great baker's--like Anna 😉
Anna is right though, certain things work better than others. From now until Christmas,you'll probably be okay, but give stuff a few months in the freezer and then you can really start being able to tell. Whenever I do a big spread of things, a lot of them have been frozen for a week or so and people always think I baked like mad that day. I laugh.
Anna says
Jen, that's a good question. People freeze cookies all the time and nobody complains. I find there is a slight loss of flavor, but maybe it's all in my head.
Brownies, however, freeze quite well. Just bake the brownies, let them cool, and wrap the whole un-cut slab in the freezer. Other bar cookies like cheesecake bars and Magic Cookie bars freeze well too.
For drop cookies, I like to make the dough ahead of time, wrap it tightly, then thaw and bake the cookies fresh the day of whatever event. I haven't noticed flavor deterioration in cookies made from frozen dough.
Those are my thoughts on freezing cookies, but plenty of people will tell you they bake and freeze their cookies months ahead with no problem. I've met people like this and have eaten their cookies and sort of disagree -- but maybe it was the baker's fault and not so much the freezing.
Jen says
Hi Anna -
Just a quick question: What are your thoughts about freezing cookies? I would love to get a jump-start on my holiday cookie-tray baking this weekend. I have never tried freezing cookies before. Have you had any luck with this?
I would be afraid it would alter the texture of some of the cookies...Do some freeze better than others? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated - I would hate to waste the time, cost of ingredients, etc. if they taste funny or if the texture is off. Thanks for any input!
Anna says
Katrina, I need to re-evaluate the cookies. I just made a batch (the chocolate chips) and am not in love, but I made a slight change. I'm going to try some more without changes.
Katrina says
Are you going to try the ccc? If so, I'll be waiting to see it and hear what ya think. Seems like a lot of sugar per/butter ratio.
Sue says
All three of those recipes sound good, and a little different. The first two strike me as being a bit expensive, but maybe they're worth it? I would like to see photos of the painted cookies. Rose Levy Bernbaum uses tinted egg yolks for painting in her Christmas Cookie book but I've never tried it, and I'm not crazy about the look based on the photos in the book.
Charlie Hills says
You know, I'm still not feeling well, Anna. I think I've caught one of those 107-hour bugs what can only be cured by a good, hot, chewy cookie. And milk. Milk in which to dunk said good, hot, chewy cookie.
VeggieGirl says
Great link!