Awesome Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I stopped looking for chocolate cookie recipes after this one. I found it at KingArthurFlour.com many years ago. They are amazing. Equal amounts flour and cocoa powder, and four times as many add-ins as flour. I think they're more than half chocolate, and yet they are cookies.

The black cocoa makes the cookies darker and richer. You can get it from KingArthurFlour.com. Or, just use regular or dutched cocoa instead.

You put in four cups of chips and/or nuts of your choice. Below is a favorite combo of mine.

Makes 21 large cookies.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 c (1 1/2 sticks) butter
• 2 c sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 Tbsp vanilla
• 1 c All-Purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 c dutched or natural cocoa powder
• 1/2 c black cocoa powder
• 1 c mini M&M's
• 1 c chocolat chips
• 1 c chocolate chunks
• 1 c white chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 for one tray at a time, or 325 on convection bake for 2-3 trays at a time.

Cream butter and sugar. In this photo, it isn't creamed enough yet. Compare with the next photo, where the sugar/butter mixture is fully creamed and fluffy. The texture is lighter because there is more air beaten into it. This makes a difference in the texture of the cookie.

Once creamy and fluffy, as below, add in the eggs one at a time and beat until fluffy.

Once the eggs are in, the dough is even fluffier. You can beat as long as you want before the flour is added, with no fear of making the cookies tough. Mix in the vanilla.

Measure the dry ingredients on wax paper or a flexible cutting board. Note: there is no leavener; this is not a mistake. Look how much darker the black cocoa is than the Hershey's.

Dump the dry into the sugar/butter/egg mixture, all at once.

Mix in slowly, or the cocoa will puff everywhere. Cocoa resists wetting.

Stop as soon as it is mixed. It will look rich and shiny.

Measure the chips... Remember, those are "mini" M&M's...

Dump them in...

And mix until just combined.

Line a heavy baking sheet with parchment. The heavy sheet helps the cookies bake more evenly. The parchment lets you bake the most gooey of cookies without fear of sticking to the pan, makes it easy to transfer to the cooling rack, and sometimes keeps the pan clean enough to put away without washing when you're done. Dip out six cookies; a 1/4 c scoop is handy for this.

Bake for 15-17 min, or until they smell good through the cloesd oven door. This is the hardest part, because they will look a little shiny, like they are molten under the surface, and like they aren't done. Freshly out of the oven, they fall apart if you try to pick them up, and seem hopelessly gooey. They do firm up as they cool. If they over-bake, they become dry, crunchy, and a little tough, but still good for dipping into milk or coffee.

Still shiny, but done...

Gooey goodness...

Parchment makes it really easy to slide the cookies off the pan onto a cooling rack.

Once they're cool, store them in an air-tight container, and hide them if you want them to last more than a day or two. The cooled cookie is still bendable, but not raw-seeming. One of these goes a long way.