Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
With melted chocolate, cocoa, and espresso powder, these are the most chocolatey-est of chocolate cookies. Intensely chocolatey. Slightly crisp on the outside, soft on the inside. Delicious.
But don’t take my word for it, check out these comments from my cookie consumers (aka my husband Dan’s co-workers):
“I’m in cookie-coma, they are so good”
“I’ll take 3 boxes please”
“Literally. melts. in. your. mouth”
The recipe created by Sarah Mullins for Cooks Illustrated Magazine is pretty straightforward. Creating the dough is about as easy as making a quick bread. Mix melted chocolate and butter into your wet ingredients then fold in your dry. That’s it! The cookies are made with unsweetened chocolate and espresso powder which helps balance the three sugars in the cookie. Brown sugar in the batter, then coated in granulated sugar and powdered sugar.
All the mixing is done by hand. So easy!
Chocolate Crinkle Cookies Recipe
Created by Sarah Mullins for Cooks Illustrated Magazine: https://www.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/8125-chocolate-crinkle-cookies
She also wrote a blog post about creating the recipe (the video in the post is the same one that accompanies the recipe): https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/22-chocolate-crinkle-cookies
The only sticking point – pun intended – is that the dough is very soft and, you guessed it, sticky. This made creating perfect balls to roll around in the sugar coating a little challenging at first. Here a few tips that worked for me.
Tips for working with sticky cookie dough
I melted the chocolate and butter together before I gathered my wet and dry ingredients. This helped make the dough a little less liquidy.
Don’t have a 2 TBSP cookie scoop? Me neither. I used a heaping TBSP measuring spoon. I may have been a little too generous with my heap since I ended up with 20 rather than 22 cookies, but it worked. Then I used a small teaspoon to help ease the ball of dough out of the measuring spoon and into the bowl of granulated sugar.
One the ball of cookie dough is in the granulated sugar, lift the ball from below (see photo) to turn it and continue coating. The sugar on the bottom prevents it from sticking to your hands. You could also sprinkle granulated sugar on top of the ball once it’s in the bowl. Either way, make sure it’s coated generously.
A ball of cookie dough in the granulated sugar. Not super neat, but once it’s coated in the sugar it’s easy to form into a smooth ball. Turning the ball in the sugar from below makes it easier to handle.
Once the dough has been coated in sugar you should be able to gently pick it up and roll it around into a ball.
Heavily coat the ball with powdered sugar. See photo.
One last note: I used 2 ½ tsp of espresso powder rather than 4 tsp. It was pretty intensely chocolatey at that amount. I’m sure they’re delicious with 4 tsp but you’ll definitely taste the espresso more.
