I don’t have any vices (coffee is a fundamental building block of life, and I will cut you I swear to god), and I’ve never had a sweet tooth. But since I did the life reboot and cut literally everything that was even close to being a vice out of my life, I’ve slowly and steadily developed these weird sugar cravings. I’m sure there are medical and psychological reasons, but that’s not what this is about.
This is about how I made these amazing cookies to satisfy both my desire to make a thing and have something sweet to shove into my face after dinner last night. I cobbled this recipe together from different bits from all over the Internets, didn’t take notes because I didn’t plan to write this post, and am doing this from memory.
Chocolate Chip Cookies With Coconut Oil and Cacao Nibs by Wil
Coconut oil is healthier than regular vegetable oil, and it gives a delicate sweetness to the foods you make with it. It may be overwhelmed by the other sweeteners in these cookies, but I prefer it to butter. Cacao nibs give this really nice extra crunch and bitter chocolate flavor (because they’re unsweetened) that balances out the sweetness in the rest of the cookies.
This makes about 12 cookies. If you need more, do the math. I believe in you.
I really want to do this all by weight, because that’s how I do my bread baking and coffee roasting/brewing, but I think it would be showing off and making things complicated when they don’t have to be, so I’m going to use standard measurements.
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/4 cup white sugar
- 1 cup coconut oil
- 1 egg
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon(ish) of salt
- 1/2 cup chocolate chips
- 1/4 cup cocoa nibs
In a perfect world, we’d throw all this stuff into a bowl, say, “Boy am I glad Donald Trump isn’t president,” and mix it all up at once. But that’s not how this works, because everything is terrible and we’re making cookies to forget that for a few minutes.
So start out — Oh. Wait. I forgot to tell you to preheat the oven. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Okay. Good job. You’re doing great.
Put the sugar into a bowl and give it a stir with a fork or whatever, just so that it’s kinda mixed up. This isn’t for any reason related to baking or chemistry, it’s just that the two colors of sugar look cool when they swirl together. It reminds me of this toy my parents had when I was a little kid that was blue sand and white sand and they wouldn’t mix together, but they would swirl around in this big oval thing and it looked really cool, like the clouds on Jupiter.
Add the coconut oil (which is probably going to be really firm since it’s winter, but if it’s melty because it’s warm in your kitchen or it’s summer when you’re making this or you live near the equator where it’s warm all the time that’s fine, too) and now stir it all together. If your coconut oil is firm, it’s probably going to separate into hunks (and not the cool fireman calendar kind). If that happens, just use your fork or whatever your stirring thing of choice is to smash the hunks around and get the mixture as smooth as you can. This is called “creaming” the ingredients together. I know it sounds kind of dirty, but I’m going to let you make whatever joke you want.
Now add the egg and the vanilla to the creamed oil and sugar, and stir it all up.
Most recipes tell you to combine the dry ingredients in another bowl. I think this is stupid and a waste of your time, creates a whole other bowl you have to wash, and isn’t something you need to do. So you can be a rebel like me and just start adding the dry ingredients to your bowl, or you can be a fucking lemming and put them in another bowl like The Man wants you to. Hey, if you want to be a puppet of Big Bowl, go nuts. I would say that I’m not judging you, but I’m totally judging you.
So add the salt and then the baking soda to the bowl, and give it a stir or two. Then take your flour, half a cup at a time, and mix it in. It’s going to be clumpy and annoying, but you just keep on adding it in until it’s more or less in one big hunk of dough.
Now, at this point, I stop using my spoon or fork or whatever, and I switch to using my hands. This is a thing I picked up from Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, which is teaching me how to bake bread: for combining stuff like this, actually using your hands gives you a sense of what the dough really feels like, and gets you closer to what you’re making, so you can literally get a better feel for it. You don’t have to do this, of course, but it’s fun, feels kind of like mooshing Play*Doh around, and it’s just satisfying to combine all that stuff together with your fists.
Mix in your chocolate chips a little bit at a time until they’re all in the dough. I used to wonder why I couldn’t just dump them all in at once, which is a legitimate question. The answer has two parts. First, it’s the way we do it, okay? It’s always been this way and if it’s not broken don’t try to fix it. If you’re so goddamn smart with your “dump them all in at once” idea, why does literally every recipe tell you to put them in a little bit at a time? You think you’re smarter than centuries of bakers? I’m so proud of you. You sicken me. Second, it actually does make a difference in the way that the chips are spread around in the dough, so that each individual cookie has a good amount of chips in it.
After you’ve put your chips in, you can put in the cocoa nibs and mix them up, too. The dough is probably getting pretty stiff at this point, so remind it to think unsexy thoughts and keep on mixing until you feel like they’re spread pretty evenly around the whole thing.
Grab a cookie sheet. If you have a Silpat
Separate the dough into 12 parts and put them on the cookie sheet. I did six at a time, in two batches, but you don’t have to do it that way if you don’t want to.
Bake for 10-12 minutes, take the cookies out of the oven, and let them sit on the cookie sheet for two or three minutes before moving them to a rack to completely cool.
Be careful if you dive into these while they’re still hot, because the super melty chocolate chips can burn the fuck out of your mouth.
These cookies have infinity calories and will last for like fifteen minutes, so you should eat them all before they spoil.
You’re welcome.
