Welcome to my first post! I’m Ofelia and I like to bake cookies in my free time. If you want to know more about me and my blog, read the About section. In this post I’ll be showing you how to make my all time favorite Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies.

If you read the About section, you already know that I started my small cookie business during the pandemic. I talked about how I found my love for baking cookies specifically and that led me to wanting to share them with my friends. But I’ve always loved cookies. I remember I had cookie play dates with my friends from my block when I was in elementary school. My best friend Ale and I used to bake all the time and have sleepovers where we watched rom-coms or horror movies mostly. Even though we never made cookies from scratch, we felt so cool cooking and posting our little cupcakes or cookies made from Betty Crocker mixes. And don’t get me wrong, I still make them sometimes. They’re quick, easy, and delicious (actually, you’ll see one of my cookie recipes where I use a Duncan Hines cake mix, later on). But there’s something so satisfying about making something that takes time and has more ingredients that you can customize to your liking.

These brown butter cookies were all over TikTok during the pandemic, and I couldn’t resist trying them. At first, my cookies melted a lot in the oven, so I started looking at different recipes and fixed the ingredients to make them more cookie-like. They are the perfect cookie to start with, definitely not the quickest, but it’ll awaken your desire to bake more of these bakery style types of cookies. People that have tried these cookies and are not the best fans of sweet stuff in general, have liked them a lot. I think that it’s because of the dark chocolate and the salt that balance the sweetness of the dough. I suggest that you keep all this recipe the same the first time you try it, and then you can maybe change some of the ingredients, like switching the dark chocolate to milk chocolate, adding any type of nuts, or skipping on the sea salt.

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
• ½ cup of unsalted butter (1 stick)
• ¾ cup of brown sugar
• ½ cup of granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• ½ teaspoon of baking soda
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons of espresso shot
• 90 gr of dark chocolate

Instructions:

1. Place a small saucepan on medium-high heat and melt the butter until it turns golden brown. Let it cool completely in a heat-resistant container or cup at room temperature.
2. In a mixing bowl, whisk together the brown sugar and white sugar until well incorporated.
3. Once the butter has cooled down, pour it into the mixing bowl with the sugar, leaving a small amount in the saucepan to avoid excess liquidity. Whisk until fully combined.
4. Add the egg, vanilla extract, and espresso shot (approximately 2 tablespoons or slightly less). Mix for about a minute and a half until smooth.
5. Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt into the mixture. Whisk a little before adding it all to the cookie mixture. Fold the mixture using a spatula, making circular motions and pressing firmly to ensure complete incorporation. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl to incorporate all ingredients evenly. Adjust the flour if the dough is too liquidy, ensuring it becomes firm without making it cake-like.
6. Cut the chocolate into medium chunks and add them to the cookie dough, folding until fully incorporated.
7. Chill the dough for at least an hour.
8. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C) for 15 minutes.
9. Form 10-11 balls from the dough, using an ice cream scoop for best results.
10. Grease a baking tray with butter and place the dough balls about 2 inches apart. Bake for 10-12 minutes, avoiding overbaking to prevent burning or excessive hardness. Even if they appear slightly undercooked, they will continue cooking as they cool.
11. Sprinkle a pinch of flaky sea salt over the cookies before they cool down.
12. Allow the cookies to cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Pro Tips

• I’ve found that HEB’s unsalted butter is the best for this recipe, I highly recommend this brand (wish this was sponsored).
• The butter has to brown (almost burn) until you see that it’s not bubbling anymore. The burntness of the butter is essential for this recipe.
• Another thing about the butter is that you can’t let it chill in the fridge (even if you want to speed up the process), trust me, I tried it and my cookies turned out so dry because the butter solidified and we don’t want that. The butter has to be liquid but cool when you add it to the recipe.
• Refrigerate the dough as much as you can, overnight or 24 hours before it works better. This is because we use espresso for this recipe, and the more time we let it rest, the better the flavor of the dough.
• You can buy an espresso shot from your local coffee shop, or make it on a moka (I like to use Café Bustelo’s espresso ground coffee when I use this). But, if you don’t have time to make it or you don’t want to use an espresso shot, you can use a mixture of 3 tablespoons of water with 2 tablespoons of instant coffee, and add 2 tablespoons of this to the cookie mixture. It works as good as the espresso shot, and if you add more instant coffee you can make it even stronger than espresso.
• While an ice cream scoop can be used to form cookie balls, an alternative method is to shape the balls by hand into a cone form. This prevents them from completely melting in the oven if the mixture is too liquidy and results in cookies with a more uniform circular shape.
• I strongly suggest that you add pecans to this recipe, it really blends with the chocolate flavor and the sea salt.
• For the aesthetic, I recommend you add extra chocolate chunks on top of the cookie balls before you put them in the oven. You’ll end up with cookies that have pools of chocolate and the salt at the end will stick better to these parts.

References

Gomez, Ofelia. “𝑪𝒉𝒊𝒑𝒛 on Instagram: ‘Chocolate Chunk Cookies🍪 También Puedes Pedirlas Con Nueces💗.’” Instagram, www.instagram.com/p/C5H2c6arpfT/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA. Accessed 29 Mar. 2024.

Megan. “Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Olives + Thyme, 4 July 2022, www.olivesnthyme.com/tahini-chocolate-chip-cookies/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2024.