Tag Archives: chocolate chips

Pumpkin Dark Chocolate Chip Bars

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Feeling a little decadent? Or need to create something out-of-the-ordinary for an open house or bake sale? Or just for you? In the Fall, pumpkin reigns king, so why not add a surprise companion with some dark chocolate?

While most pumpkin cookies skew cakey, these bars are as rich and chewy as the center of a chocolate chip cookie. And who doesn’t love those? To counteract the added moisture from the pumpkin purée, this recipe has a few tricks up its sleeve: For starters, it completely ditches the eggs.

Browning the butter does double duty, removing water while also giving the dough a deeper flavor with nutty notes. Baking the bars at a low temperature keeps the edges soft, resulting in an impossibly chewy cookie texture with a warm pumpkin spice flavor and pockets of molten chocolate.

The chocolate pieces take several hours to harden, so you may not want to package them until several hours go by, But in the meantime, go ahead and nosh on a few while they are still warm and gooey.

Pumpkin Dark Chocolate Chip Bars

  • Servings: 24 bars
  • Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

  • ¾ cup unsalted butter (1½ sticks)
  • Nonstick cooking spray or neutral oil
  • 1¾ cups packed light brown sugar
  • ¾ cup canned pumpkin purée (not pumpkin pie filling)
  • 2 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 2½ cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 1 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 tsp. kosher salt
  • 1 tsp. ground ginger
  • ¼ tsp. ground cloves
  • ¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
  • 10 oz. bag of dark chocolate chips, save about a 1/2 cup for the topping

Directions

  1. In a small (preferably light-colored) saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Continue cooking, stirring constantly to prevent the milk solids from burning, until the butter foams, darkens into a light amber color and becomes fragrant and nutty, about 3 to 4 minutes more. (Watch closely to make sure the butter doesn’t burn.) Immediately pour the butter along with any of the browned milk solids into a large heatproof mixing bowl. Let cool for 20 minutes until warm but no longer hot.
  2. While the butter cools, heat the oven to 325°F. Grease a 9-by-13-inch metal or glass baking pan with cooking spray or oil and line with a strip of parchment paper that hangs over the two long sides to create a sling.
  3. Add the brown sugar, pumpkin purée and vanilla extract to the cooled butter and whisk until smooth and glossy. Add the flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, salt, ginger, cloves and nutmeg and stir with a spatula just until a soft dough forms with no pockets of unincorporated flour. (Try not to overmix.) Add most of the chocolate chips and stir to evenly distribute throughout the dough.
  4. Transfer the dough to the prepared baking pan and press into an even layer using a spatula. Sprinkle the top with the remaining chocolate chips, pressing them in slightly so they stick.
  5. Bake until the bars are puffed, the top is lightly browned and a skewer or knife inserted into the center comes out clean with just a few moist crumbs attached or with smudges of melted chocolate, 30 to 45 minutes. (Mine took the full 45 minutes.)
  6. Let the bars cool in the pan on a wire rack for at least 1 hour. (Even after cooling for over 2 hours, the chocolate pieces were still too soft to package.) Using the parchment paper, lift the bars out of the pan and cut into 24 squares. The cookie bars will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 5 days.

http://www.lynnandruss.com

Adapted from a recipe by Jesse Szewczyk for NYTimes Cooking

Caramel Chocolate Chunk Cookies

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Here’s another cookie without eggs as an ingredient. And you might be a bit confused because they get baked in muffin tins. Chef/author Dorie Greenspan claims, the purpose of which helps to caramelize the bottoms—thus the name. However, I think that’s stretching the truth a bit. The butter in the tin cups does make them easy to remove but doesn’t necessarily give them a noticeable caramelized bottom—but by no means takes away from the wonderful flavor of the cookie.

Once the dough has been refrigerated, it’s just a matter of cutting the logs into 1/2-inch slices, popping them into the muffin cups, and baking. Dorie says “You might be tempted to use a baking sheet, but I hope you won’t—the texture is really best in the muffin tins.” Seeing as how they disappeared quickly after baking them, I’d say they were a hit!

Caramel Chocolate Chunk Cookies

  • Servings: Yields about 2 dozen
  • Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

  • 2 sticks unsalted butter, (8 oz.) cut into chunks, at room temperature
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
  • 1/2 tsp. fine sea salt
  • 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 heaping cup of chunks of dark chocolate, or large chips

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, beat the butter, both sugars, and the salt together on medium speed until creamy, about 2 minutes. Beat in the vanilla. Add the flour all at once. Pulse a few times, just until the risk of flying flour has passed, and then beat on low speed until the flour is almost completely incorporated. Don’t beat too much—you want the mixture to be more clumpy than smooth.
  2. Add the chocolate and fold in with a flexible spatula.
  3. Knead the dough if necessary so it comes together. Divide it in half, and shape each hunk into a 6-inch-long log; they will be a scant 2 inches in diameter. Wrap each log in plastic, and refrigerate until firm, at least 2 hours. (The logs can be refrigerated for 3 days or frozen for 2 months.)
  4. Preheat the oven to 350°. Butter a muffin tin—two if you have them. Mark one log at ½-inch intervals, then cut into rounds with a chef’s knife, cutting hard through the chips. Place each puck in a muffin cup. Bake for 20 to 22 minutes, until the cookies are browned around the edges and slightly soft in the center.
  5. Let the cookies rest for 3 minutes, then gently pry each one out with the tip of a table knife and let cool on a rack. Let the pan cool, then repeat with the remaining log. Serve the cookies warm or at room temperature.

http://www.lynnandruss.com

Adapted from a recipe by Dorie Greenspan