Mocha cookies...

We're having to move around the weekly Wednesday Treat Day to Thursday this week, so as long as plans stay on course, I should be posting about the treat tomorrow. I do, however, have something sweet to share that I made a little while ago.

Chocolate chips are a staple around this house, but there are a couple other chips that I always have in the pantry - Cinnamon and Cappuccino! We've used them in everything from fudge to muffins and apple bars. This time, we tossed a couple large handfuls of both into the dough for these Mocha Cookies.

Darkening the dough and adding a chocolate flavor is the addition of unsweetened cocoa powder - I used natural cocoa for these to add a slightly more bitter note. While the dough was slightly sticky, I didn't find that I needed to refrigerate it at all to control spreading - they were in the middle of the road between thick and thin. Using a combination of white granulated sugar and moist brown sugar imbued the cookies with a chewy texture that still had a bit of crispness to it. For the full cappuccino experience (in a sense anyway), a whole tablespoon worth of espresso powder is added while you cream together the butter and sugar - if you use instant coffee powder, you might want to up the amount a bit.

With chocolate cookies it can be harder to tell when they are done - you'll want to bake these just long enough to set the center. This means that the center should still be moist and will probably not spring back when you touch it, but the cookies shouldn't collapse or have raw dough in the center either. I'm one who likes to nibble around the edges of a cookie and then chomp down on the center and when I got to the middle, this decadent cookie had a charming, almost alluring, fudgy quality to it. Not quite as squidgy as you might expect in a brownie, but reminiscent of such. I got around 40 cookies using a tablespoon cookie scoop, but this recipe would halve easily if you don't need as many tempting you to sneak another bite. As if they were not already delicious enough, I had to be a little naughty and soup these up with a scoop of espresso ice cream to make an outrageous cookie sandwich.

Recipes
Mocha Cookies