Thin & Crispy Cinnamon & Milk Chocolate Cookies
I got to interview Dorie Greenspan for an article about chocolate chip cookies, and the whole experience-emailing with the lovely Dorie, learning new tips about a treat I imagined I’d mastered, and then baking the best chocolate chip cookies of my life-provided one of those moments where my odd career made sense.
Between researching and writing, Dorie’s best baking wisdom sent me sprinting to the kitchen. (FYI, her forthcoming book, Dorie’s Cookies
is going to have absolute tons of cookie wisdom, delivered in Dorie’s signature sweet style). For hours, I had flour and sugar flying through the air as I experimented with changing the proportions of brown sugar to white sugar and considering how much to reduce the overall amount of sweetener when I swapped in milk chocolate for semisweet.
One of the most thought-provoking ideas Dorie shared with me was this: you could add spices to chocolate chip cookies. Though I love cinnamon in my oatmeal and cardamom in my lassi, when it comes to cookie baking, I only reach into my spice rack to grab the vanilla. Not so on that day of extreme baking.
These cookies are one of the experiments, a foray into increased butter, decreased brown sugar, and spice. I love how they turned out. They’re small, thin, crisp, and buttery (you can see the difference next to the pile of more traditional cookies on the right. Recipe here.) They’re sweet but sophisticated. The sophistication, I think, owes much to their mystery: the combination of brown sugar, cinnamon, and milk chocolate has echoes both of gingersnaps and of the best crispy chocolate chip cookies in the Tate’s tradition.
- 2¼ cups all-purpose flour
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1¼ cups (2½ sticks) unsalted butter, left on the counter for 30 minutes
- 1¼ cups granulated sugar
- ¾ cup packed dark brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 12 ounces chopped best-quality milk chocolate or 2 cups milk chocolate chips
- Preheat oven to 350°F. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon; set aside. In a large mixing bowl, place the butter and both sugars. Use a handheld or stand mixer (or your strong arm!) to combine and beat until slightly fluffy. Beat in the eggs until well mixed, about 1 minute. Dump in the flour mixture, and mix that until just combined. Stir in the chocolate.
- Form rounded teaspoon-size balls of dough and place them about 3 inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets.
- Bake until cookies are golden brown 12 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven, and let cool on baking sheet 1 to 2 minutes. Slide the parchment onto wire racks, then let the cookies cool completely. Repeat with any remaining dough.
- Store cooled cookies in an airtight container at room temperature up to 1 week.
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Warm Vanilla Sugar
