Chocolate Puddle Cookies

These are hard to mess up. Don't you wish every recipe began with those words and meant them?  I found this cookie recipe on, where else, 101 Cookbooks.  I stumbled upon it by accident when I was looking for a cobbler recipe a few weeks ago.  At the time, I was really only looking for baking recipes that included fruit so I just made a mental note, stashed the recipe aside, and moved on.  

Usually my mental notes get lost among the thousands of other post-its in my mind, but for some reason this one stuck.  It may be the crackly, shiny top of these ooey, gooey, chocolate cookies from the picture that Heidi posted or maybe it was that o-so simple recipe that I remember glancing over that made me want to go back.  Whatever it was, I'm glad I remembered seeing this recipe because after making chocolate puddle cookies yesterday, these are officially going to be the base of every single kind of chocolate cookie I make.  

I love these cookies not only because it reminds me of a cross between a meringue and a fudgy brownie, but because there is no flour or butter making the clean-up easy. 

Here we go.

So when I say that these are hard to mess up, I mean it.  Unless you count making the cookies too large a mess-up.  The recipe says it make 18 cookies but I made 12 extra large ones.  This was mostly because I was eyeballing two tablespoons of batter per cookie (guess my eyeballing is a little off).  But now I can feel less guilty about eating them since I'll just be having one cookie per serving instead of two or three.


Here's my take on Heidi's recipe:


Ingredients:


3 cups mix of pistachios and walnut halves, toasted & cooled and coarsely chopped
4 cups confectioner's (powdered) sugar
1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
scant 1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
4 large egg whites, room temperature
1 tablespoon real, good-quality vanilla extract


Preheat oven to 320F degrees and position the racks in the top and the bottom third of the oven.  Line two (preferably rimmed) baking pans with parchment paper. 


Toast your walnuts and pistachios in a pan until they are golden brown and fragrant.  


In the mean time, in a large bowl sift together salt, confectioner's sugar, and cocoa powder. 


Once the nuts have toasted and cooled, chop coarsely and stir into your sifted dry ingredients.


Add egg whites and vanilla.  Stir well to combine. The mixture should feel and look like melted chocolate marshmallows.


Spoon the batter onto your prepared baking sheets in mounds of about two tablespoons each.  Make sure that you leave plenty of room between cookies and between the edges of the pan as they will expand outwards like puddles.  Usually no more than six cookies per pan.  


Bake for about 12-15 minutes.  The cookies should puff up and the tops should become glossy and crack a bit.


Slide the warm cookies on to a cooling rack and then them cool completely.

And voila.  The easiest, most delicious, flour-less cookies. 
I think I'm starting to get the hang of this baking thing that people love so much. 
Happy Wednesday!