Chocolate Espresso Cookies

Good afternoon! I hope everyone is doing well. Yesterday the new semester started at my school, but luckily today I don't have any classes, so what better way to spend it than making cookies? I'm not sure how I first came across this recipe, but it's from Epicurious and has a rating of a full four forks, and it certainly lives up to those four forks.

This cookie is intensely dark and rich and just delicious, and it gets rave reviews! Even my brother likes them, and he usually doesn't care much for sweets, so that's a great compliment! :) It contains two types of chocolate, semi-sweet and unsweetened melted and then mixed in and then semi-sweet chocolate chips mixed into the batter. This recipe contains many interesting elements to it that defy a normal cookie recipe. One of these elements is that it contains ground coffee in it. Usually recipes will call for instant coffee powder or maybe even a shot of brewed coffee, but these cookies contain actual ground up beans in them! Secondly, there's no creaming method. Instead, you beat the eggs with the sugar and coffee until it's light-colored, to the ribbon stage. The butter gets melted with the chocolates and then mixed in. And thirdly, the cookie "dough" actually comes out to be a batter. It looks like brownie batter and actually you could probably make these as brownies instead! One of the things I like about this cookie is that if you didn't know the recipe had coffee in it, you probably wouldn't detect it. You'd just taste a deeply, dark, rich chocolate, which is what a love about combining coffee and chocolate. I didn't change a thing from this recipe, except to omit the walnuts.

Chocolate Espresso Cookies (Adapted from Epicurious)

Ingredients

• 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
• 2 cups (1 12-ounce bag) semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• 3 large eggs
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 1/4 teaspoons finely-ground dark roast coffee beans
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/3 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup walnuts (I do like walnuts, but I just didn't want them in my cookie, so I omitted)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F and grease 2 large heavy baking sheets. (I just used parchment paper.)
2. In a double boiler or a metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water melt unsweetened chocolate, 1 cup chocolate chips, and butter, stirring until smooth, and remove top of double boiler or bowl from heat.
   
3. In a bowl with an electric mixer beat eggs, sugar, and ground coffee on high speed until very thick and pale and mixture forms a ribbon when beaters are lifted, about 3 minutes, and beat in chocolate mixture. Into mixture sift in flour, baking powder, and salt and stir until just combined. Stir in remaining chocolate chips and walnuts. (As I said before, the mixture will resemble brownie batter, so don't freak out that it doesn't look like traditional cookie dough!)
4. Drop batter by heaping tablespoons about 2 inches apart onto baking sheets and bake in batched in middle of oven 8 to 10 minutes, or until puffed and cracked on top. Cool cookies in baking sheets 1 minute and transfer to racks to cool completely. (I always put my cookie dough in the refrigerator for a couple of hours before baking. I really suggest you do that with this recipe too. Not only will the batter stiffen up and be much easier to handle, but refrigeration always helps to give cookies nice chewy centers and crispy edges.)
   

(By the way, I'm working on making sure I use natural light for my photos. The one of the cookies was taken in natural light while the (awful) picture of the batter (and all of the pictures from the Banoffee Pie recipe ) was taken in artificial. My camera's not that great, but I'm doing my best to take good pictures! :) Thank the lord for Picnik! )