My Recipe for "Adult" Cookies

I love cookies, or, as they are called in Germany, “American Cookies”, or, as they are called in America, “Chocolate chip cookies”.

However, I am part of the hypocritical elite that does not enjoy sweets loaded with fats and sugars to the brim anymore. Nowadays, I look to what you might call “healthy” versions of snacks. If you want to appear really smart, you can call them “adult variants” with “complex flavor profiles” full of “homemade goodness”. Are they actually healthy? Of course not, it’s still a cookie.

Anyway, this is the recipe that I came up with and I like making at the moment. It balances some elements of sweetness with flavors like savoriness, bitterness, and saltiness that make the cookies feel more like actual nutrition, and build the contrast that makes the sugary and chocolaty bits taste so nice.

Ingredients

• 80g of coconut oil & 30g of butter
  • Substitute: 110g of pure butter or coconut oil
• 125g of granulated white sugar
• 50g of molasses
  • Substitute: Leave out the molasses and white sugar; instead, use 175g of brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract
  • Substitute: Replace some of the white sugar with vanilla sugar
• 1 egg
  • vegan substitute: 60g of apple purée
• 190g of all-purpose flour (Germany: Type 550 wheat flour)
• 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of MSG
  • Substitute: it’s optional, just leave it
• 170g of dark chocolate chips / chopped dark chocolate
• 50g of chopped pecan nuts
  • Substitute: it’s optional, just leave it

Steps

1. Warm up the fat. If you are using butter, this can be done by leaving it at room-temperature. For coconut oil, I recommend using the microwave.
2. Mix the fat, sugar, molasses, and vanilla extract until it becomes a homogenous mass.
3. Add the egg to the mixture and mix it in.
4. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt, and MSG. (The point of this is to prevent clumps.) Then, incorporate it into the wet ingredients.
5. Finally, incorporate the chocolate and nuts. If you have been using an electric mixer so far, you probably want to switch to a spoon or spatula at this step, as the dough can become hard to work with.
6. Divide the dough into 16 equal-sized pieces (for medium-sized cookies) and form them into balls with your hands.
7. Let the dough cool in the fridge for at least 3 hours. You could do this before splitting and forming the balls, but the dough becomes hard as a brick when chilled.
8. Place the balls onto a baking sheet.
9. Pre-heat your oven to 180°C (“conventional” oven / top-and-bottom-heat).
10. Bake the cookies for 10 minutes. Let them cool (best case, on a cooling rack) before eating.

Nutrition