Milk & Cookies

I got the recipe for these waffle cookies from the Southwest magazine (May 2010). They looked fun! The author (Lauren Chattman) said that she was looking to make cookies faster than usual so she decided to use the waffle iron which takes only a few minutes to bake. There are a few things wrong with this logic, one being that you can only bake about 4 cookies at a time (4 cookies at 3.5 minutes each compared to 12 cookies at 12 minutes each for regular oven sheet cookies… you can see it’s really a wash). The other problem is that it is somewhat messy. You have to clean your waffle iron afterwards instead of just throwing out a piece of parchment paper like you would for a sheet of cookies. Surely that takes some time? My dishwasher (read Jason) is pretty good, but not that good. Not “I’ll clean up the mess you made trying some crazy cookie experiment that I didn’t even like” good. One more logistical problem: the cookies take up too much space! You need extra large tupperware because each cookie has so much air.

Anyway, putting logistics aside for now, these cookies were indeed fun and delicious. They are pretty similar to regular toll house chocolate chip cookies, but with lots of crunchy edges. It is not possible to make these cookies non-crunchy. If they’re not crunchy, they won’t come out of your waffle iron. This is why Jason didn’t like them – he loves the ooey gooey center of cookies and these didn’t have that. I love ooey gooey centers too, but that doesn’t stop me loving crunchy cookies. I’m open-minded.

Anyway, here’s the ingredients:

1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup plus 2 Tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp instant espresso powder (I left this out)
1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips or chunks (I used chips)

Combine them just as you would any other cookie recipe to make batter. I believe it has a higher ratio of butter to everything else, making the batter extra oily and the cookies extra crunchy. Put a blob right in the middle of each square of your waffle iron. Don’t try to get fancy by only focusing on one at a time. Jason tried to get fancy and it confused the waffle iron’s temperature sensor. Cook for about 3.5 minutes. You can check earlier, but it may tear your cookie in half. Better wait at least 3 minutes before checking.

Then remove the cookie as you would a waffle – stick a fork in the side and simple machine (lever, not screw!) that baby out. Some cookie may remain on the waffle iron, particularly some chocolate chips. I worried about it at first, but it doesn’t really seem to cause a problem to leave them in the waffle iron for a few more cookie runs. I’d watch out if I was doing several batches, but for this it was fine. Maybe some of the leftover chocolate chips even got incorporated in the next run?

As happens fairly often on here, I will close with a picture of my cat. This is Petra, our 8 1/2 year old, never tears up the couch, never throws up, never goes outside the litter box, never gets fat no matter how much we feed her, too snobby for wet food, best cat in the world!