Saturday Snacks: Ghirardelli’s Ultimate Double Chocolate Cookies!

We all have our food preferences, don’t we? We have our favorites, and our not-so-favorites. For me, I’m not nuts about nuts in baked goods. When a recipe calls for the addition of nuts, I politely omit them. Nuts in my favorite banana bread recipe? No thanks. How about in chocolate chip cookies? Nope. No way. Back in the day, I even knocked the chopped nuts off of the top of my snack time Little Debbie brownies. They just weren’t my thing.

It’s with this in mind that I took a deep breath and approached this weekend’s Saturday Snack recipe for Ghirardelli’s Ultimate Double Chocolate Cookies. This Sunday is National Ice Cream Day (a holiday I wholeheartedly support), and, since Ghirardelli is an ice cream and all-things-sweet staple in both Walt Disney World‘s Disney Springs and Disney California Adventure, I knew that we needed to bake up a batch. However, the recipe for these decadent, incredibly chocolatey cookies calls for the inclusion of chopped walnuts. Umm. After an internal debate over whether or not to include the nuts, I decided to have the best of both worlds: I’d make a few with nuts, and the rest without. After all, if I’m going to make a Saturday Snacks recipe, I always like to stick to the original recipe. A few with nuts and the majority without will be a win-win, right?

Since we’re whipping up a Ghirardelli recipe, I thought that it would only be right to use Ghirardelli chocolate chips. I mean, if we’re going make a recipe with the words “ultimate” and “Ghirardelli” in the name, we have to really go for it, right?

Today’s recipe begins not with preheating the oven, but with setting up a double boiler. If you don’t have a double boiler, you can go the route that we’ve taken on Saturdays in the past: grab a pot, fill it halfway or so with water, place a glass bowl on top of the pot, and heat the water in the pot to a gentle, rolling boil.

Drop the 6 tablespoons of butter into the glass bowl, and pour in the bag of those glorious bittersweet chocolate chips. And pour a few into your mouth, of course.

It’ll take a bit for the chocolate and butter to melt in the double boiler, but, when they do, the mixture will have a smooth and glossy appearance.

While the chocolate is melting, toss 3 eggs and a cup of sugar into a large bowl (or the bowl of a stand mixer), and mix them until they thicken up and take on a lighter yellow hue.

Grab a smaller bowl out of the cabinet, and combine 1/3 cup of flour and 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder.

At this point, I transferred the chocolate mixture into a separate large bowl. I stirred the egg mixture into the chocolate, and then added the flour mixture.

You might be thinking that this recipe is already maxed out on chocolate, but, let’s once again remember that “ultimate” is in the title. Grab that 12 ounce bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips and add THE ENTIRE BAG into the batter. This is when we come to the will you/won’t you moment with the chopped walnuts. If nuts in cookies is your thing, this is when you can add them into the batter. If you’d rather not use them, blissfully skip ahead.

I placed a portion of the batter into a smaller bowl and added what I estimated to be the appropriate amount of chopped walnuts. All for the sake of Saturday Snacks.

The batter is a super soft consistency, almost like brownie batter. In order to get the dough to take on more of a dough-like texture, the recipe calls for us to get creative with plastic wrap. Instead of dropping the dough onto the baking sheets, we’ll be slicing the dough and placing the dough discs onto the sheets.

Let’s help the batter get ready for slicing by placing the batter on a sheet of plastic wrap and rolling it up to make a 2 inch log.

When your batter is wrapped up, toss it in the refrigerator for at least an hour. After an hour, my dough needed a bit longer to get to the point where I could slice it.

In the meantime, prep your baking sheets with spray oil or a sheet of parchment paper.

In general, I’m a pretty patient person. That goes out the window when cookies are involved. After an hour and a half, the dough logs weren’t firm enough to slice. Perhaps I made the logs too thick; regardless, I was bound and determined to go ahead and make these cookies already.

I found that the easiest and least messy way to slice the cookies was to grab my kitchen shears and cut through the plastic wrap.

Once the dough discs were cut, I made sure to peel off all of the plastic wrap (because baked-in plastic wrap would be tragic at this point), and I gently reshaped the dough and placed each disc onto a cookie sheet. I spaced the discs out about an inch and a half like the recipe recommends.

Friends, I cackled à la an evil genius scientist when I peeked into the oven to check on the cookies. They had the shiny surface that the recipe calls for, and I was so happy to see that they were looking over-the-top delicious. After 14 minutes, they emerged from the oven.

These cookies had me at hello. They couldn’t have been more perfect. And, of course, as someone who doesn’t necessarily want walnuts in my cookies, I liked the cookies without them better. That being said, if nuts are your thing, toss ’em in, and you’ll love these cookies.

The cookies were ginormous. They were extremely chocolatey, and, if you choose to celebrate National Ice Cream Day, they would be perfectly paired with a scoop of your favorite flavor.

The thick, heavy cookies were fudgy and filled with melty chocolate chips, because, as you might have guessed, I didn’t wait for them to fully cool. Life is short. Eat your cookies while they’re warm.

The recipe mentions that you can store Ghirardelli’s Ultimate Double Chocolate cookies in an airtight tin for up to a week. Don’t worry if you don’t have an airtight tin; you won’t need it. I have a feeling these cookies won’t be around for days and days. They’re just that good.

I hope that your weekend is a great one. If you make these amazing cookies, please let me know. Happy Saturday, everyone!

Ready to bake up some serious magic? The recipe is below:

Ultimate Double Chocolate Cookies from Ghirardelli

Yield: 24 cookies

• 12 ounce(s) semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 10 ounce(s) 60% cacao bittersweet chocolate chips
• 6 tablespoon(s) unsalted butter
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup(s) sugar
• 1/3 cup(s) all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon(s) baking powder
• 1 cup(s) chopped walnuts

Directions
1. In double boiler over hot water, melt bittersweet chocolate chips and butter.
2. In large bowl with electric mixer or whisk, beat eggs and sugar until thick; stir into chocolate mixture.
3. In small bowl, stir together flour and baking powder; stir into chocolate mixture. Gently mix in semi-sweet chocolate chips and walnuts.
4. Using a sheet of plastic wrap, form dough into two logs, each 2 inches in diameter and about 12 inches long.
5. As dough will be quite soft, use plastic wrap to hold dough in log shape. Wrap tightly; refrigerate at least 1 hour or until firm.
6. Heat oven to 375°F. Unwrap dough; with sharp knife, cut into 3/4-inch slices.
7. Place slices 1 1/2 inches apart on greased or parchment-lined cookie sheet.
8. Bake 12 to 14 minutes or until shiny crust forms on top but interior is still soft. Cool on baking sheet; store in airtight tin up to 1 week.

Source: D23