chocolate chip cookies: redux

Valentine’s Day comes but once a year, and most of us either rejoice in it or loathe it, sometimes regardless of our relationship status. This year I fell more on the side of rejoicing in it, being a happy singleton. Honestly, I almost forgot last Monday was Valentine’s Day, until I realized that many of my coworkers received bouquets of flowers from their significant others. While some people would get upset that they didn’t receive flowers, I was looking forward to spending my Valentine’s with my good buddy and former roommate Devin, a fellow happy singleton. We decided to relive our roommate years with a little tv-on-dvd marathon combined with some baked goods. Since Devin was providing the big flat-screen and his apartment, I offered to bake cookies. I chose cookies so I’d have the opportunity to fix the mistakes from a few weeks ago and also try out my new Silpat sheets.

In response to my question, “Do you have a favorite cookie?” Devin said, “Chocolate Chip Walnut from Levain Bakery.” Oh great, I thought, I’m going to be up against a cookie from a professional bakery, yippee. I told him I’d try my best.

Thanks to the internet, finding recipes is a cinch, even if it’s one that’s a guarded secret. Levain has kept their cookie recipes unpublished, but that hasn’t stopped intrepid bakers around NYC to give it their best shot at duplicating the recipe. One of the recipes that I found was on the blog Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives by Lisa Michele, who took it upon herself to try to make the Levain Bakery Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies a few years ago. If you poke around on her site a bit – which I highly recommend – you’ll find she made a second attempt at the recipe almost a year later. I chose to stick with the first one because it seemed a little easier to handle and only called for light brown sugar, which I already had on hand.  I creamed the sugar and then beat the eggs in one at a time. Then I added all of the dry ingredients including 3 1/4 cups of flour – which seemed like a heck of a lot of flour for one little cookie recipe.

Once all the dry ingredients were incorporated, her instructions called for “gently” folding in the chocolate and the nuts, which I have to say I chuckled at. This dough was really stiff and any folding that happened was not going to be gentle. I need to also remark that I had neglected to realize that I didn’t have enough semi-sweet chocolate chips to cover the 2 cups that I needed, so I started to chop up my semi-sweet baker’s chocolate, only to find I didn’t have enough of that also. I added one square of unsweetened baker’s chocolate, just to pump up my numbers, but when all was done, I only wound up putting in 1 1/2 cups of semi-sweet morsels and chunks. It looked like enough, so I just went with it, and folded in the chocolate and the walnuts as gently as possible.

Once that was combined, the mixture went into the refrigerator for an hour, and I feel like this was really key to ultimately making this recipe a big success. With the dough so cold, it was really easy to form it up into the ginormous cookies that look just like the ones at Levain Bakery. This recipe takes the ingredients you’d use to make a normal batch of 24 cookies and yields approximately 12. Not only would the cookies warm our hearts for Valentine’s Day, apparently they’d stop them as well.

I preheated the oven, and pulled the dough out of the fridge. I set up my cookie sheets with my brand new Silpat sheets and got ready to form up the cookies. Since only four would fit on each of my cookie sheets, I had to do these cookies in a few different batches. Also, since Lisa’s recipe isn’t very specific on baking time (16-23 minutes is a long window for cookies!) I started with just four cookies and went for 16 minutes. They were way underdone at 16, so I put them in for a few additional minutes. They came out looking perfect.

Confident that the time of about 18-19 minutes wouldn’t burn the cookies, I threw the next batch in with two trays and started cleaning up. Again, they came out looking perfect. I was really happy with the way they turned out. And thanks to the Silpat sheets, no burned bottoms! Hurray! Thanks for the tip, Anna!

The following night, I met Devin after work. We took the train out to his place in Queens and ordered some food from a local Peruvian restaurant that never sent our order. After we slowly starved for a bit, we decided we had to crack open the cookies and have some as we watched a couple episodes of Will & Grace Season 8.

These cookies are so good. So good! I could not believe that they came out of my kitchen! They were moist on the inside, but not raw. The chocolate was still gooey and melted on our fingers a little bit. And the cookies were just baked to perfection. I normally am not a fan of nuts in cookies, but I loved the big chunks of walnut in these. They really jazz up the whole cookie experience and give each of the cookies a little bit of body. Without the walnuts, these would just be rather boring, so I appreciate them not just for making the cookies better, but helping me to expand my own palate.

And for the moment of truth, asking Devin how my cookies compared to Levain Bakery’s cookies: “Not the same.” My heart sank for the microsecond it took him to qualify his response. “Your cookies had an airiness to them. Levain cookies are very thick, so I appreciate the airiness. Your cookies were lighter.”

Success! Many thanks to Lisa – I couldn’t have done this one without her help. I hope that I’ll be able to develop the skills necessary to duplicate someone else’s recipe myself someday. This recipe is definitely a keeper and one I can’t wait to make again.

Thanks for reading!

- Jon