Reverse chocolate chip cookies

So I’ve just realised that I have a serious chocolate problem. One symptom: I believe I can “improve” every recipe by adding chocolate to it – well, every sweet recipe, anyway. And I’ve done it again!

These decadent little treats are a chocolate lover’s dream – a good dose of melted chocolate gleefully blended into a chewy cookie mixture, and plenty of white chocolate chips thrown in to give your teeth something exciting to hook into (and also provide a nicer visual than brown-on-brown).

My main piece of advice with chocolate chip cookies is to very carefully monitor the cooking time. Everyone’s oven works a little differently, so perhaps even do a few test runs of one or two cookies to find out what the ideal cooking time is in your oven. And it’s much better to take them out too early than leave them in too long. Who wants crunchy chocolate chips cookies? 

When you take them out of the oven, the cookies will be tall and puffy, and you might think they’re undercooked, but rest assured that they will collapse back into a normal cookie shape as they cool. Leave them to rest on the oven trays for a while, otherwise they will be far too floppy to transfer onto the wire racks.

Interesting fact: chocolate chip cookies were invented by a happy mistake! A cook named Ruth Wakefield was making cookies and, after running out of her usual ingredient (the exact ingredient varies depending on which version of this story you read), decided to use chopped up chocolate instead, thinking it would melt into the cookies as they cooked. Luckily, she was wrong, and so began the life of chocolate-chip cookies, which were initially named “toll house cookies” (after the name of Wakefield’s inn). It’s hard to believe this only happened about eighty years ago – can you imagine life without chocolate chip cookies?

Ingredients

120 g Nuttelex (see tips below for alternatives)

½ tsp vanilla extract

85 g brown sugar

85 g white sugar

½ large egg

190 g plain flour

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp cocoa powder

50 g dark chocolate Melts, roughly chopped

160 g white chocolate chips

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170°C and line baking trays with baking paper.
2. Melt the dark chocolate pieces in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring the bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until chocolate is melted and smooth.
3. Allow chocolate to cool while beating together Nuttelex, vanilla, sugars and egg with an electric mixer until light in colour and texture (see image below).
4. Scoop a cupful of the mixture into the melted dark chocolate and mix together with a spoon to bring down the temperature of the chocolate, before adding it to the rest of the mixture and mixing thoroughly until the colour is even.
5. Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder into a large bowl. Add half at a time to the mixture, mixing well after each.
6. Add white chocolate chips and mix lightly and briefly with the elective mixer or by hand.
7. Refrigerate 1 hour.
8. Roll mixture into 3 cm balls and place on the prepared baking trays approximately 3 cm apart from each other.
9. Bake cookies for 10 minutes. Cool on trays for about15 minutes or until cookies can be lifted across to wire racks without bending too much. Cool completely on wire racks.

Makes 25–30.

Step 3 – beat the mixture until it becomes light

Step 4 – add some of the mixture to the melted chocolate

Tips

• Nuttelex is a dairy-free table spread, which we used in my house while I was growing up. It’s an alternative to butter and margarine, and you can find it beside them in Australian supermarkets. I’ve also tried this recipe with unsalted butter and Meadow Lea (margarine), and they all work fine, but I love the Nuttelex ones best. Just use whatever you have in the fridge.
• If you don’t have white chocolate chips, it’s perfectly okay to simply chop up a white chocolate block, but make sure the pieces are the size of chocolate chips – because huge lumps of white chocolate don’t taste as nice in a cookie as huge chunks of real chocolate do.
• If you’re wondering why the ingredients list specifies half an egg, it’s because this recipe in its original form makes about 60 cookies from one egg. I crack one egg into a glass and whisk it well with a fork to combine the yolk and the white, then pour half of it into the mixture (very slowly and carefully or the entire egg will plop in all at once). I haven’t tried using an entire egg, but chances are it would work okay.
• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• The mixture will be fine if left in the refrigerator for longer than an hour, but will become firmer the longer it’s in there.
• This recipe makes enough cookies to require three baking trays. Because I only have two, I put the cookie mixture back in the fridge while the first two trayfuls are cooking and cooling.