My friend Amy and a handful of other bloggers were invited to the Pillsbury Bake-Off. They had a great time and shared their experiences, mostly positive but with a few criticisms -- one being that very few recipes were from scratch. It’s a good point, and as the Bake-Off evolves and changes with the times, maybe we’ll see a resurgence in scratch baking and Bake-Off will continue to add “flour” to their list of eligible ingredients.
But back to Bake-off #44, Amy counted 5 finalists who used flour as a primary ingredient, and noted her three favorites. There was a rich peanut butter cupcake, a chocolate scone that was almost brownie-like, and a chocolate cookie with an interesting combination of ingredients. The cookies with the interesting combination of ingredients were Denise H.' s "Deluxe Triple-Chocolate Cookies". As you can tell from the fact this post exists, I tried them!
Deluxe Triple Chocolate Cookies Review
My big worry was that they’d be a waste of good Nutella. I’ve baked it into a few desserts with mixed results. Sometimes it’s detectable, but sometimes you can hardly taste it. In this case, the Nutella flavor was mixed in with so many other flavors I really didn't taste it, but I do think it contributed to the cookies' great texture. Mine were slightly crisp on the outside and very chewy. If I'd baked them longer, they might have been a little crisper.
An even more unusual ingredient was the cocoa powder, Hershey’s Good Night brand to be exact. It sounds like an odd addition, but the drink mix type cocoa powder does have dried milk in it, which also contributes to the great texture.
So these cookies didn't have a strong Nutella flavor, but what seemed like a big bouquet of flavors mainly of milk chocolate and peanut butter. I should also add that my husband took these to work and everyone went crazy for them.
Recipe
Deluxe Triple Chocolate Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup unsalted or salted butter, softened (230 grams)
- ¾ cup packed brown sugar (150 grams)
- ¾ cup granulated sugar (150 grams)
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- ½ cup hazelnut spread with cocoa (Nutella)
- ½ cup peanut butter (like Jif)
- 5 oz milk chocolate hot cocoa mix (four 1.25-oz envelopes) or 1 cup milk chocolate instant hot cocoa mix (dry)
- 2 cups all-purpose flour, bleached PB Best (270 grams)
- 1 cup old-fashioned or quick-cooking oats
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 bag 12 oz semisweet chocolate baking chips (2 cups)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375°F. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
- Beat butter and sugars with electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy.
- Beat in eggs and vanilla, then reduce heat to low and beat in hazelnut spread, peanut butter and cocoa mix.
- Stir in flour, oats, salt and baking soda until well blended. Stir in chocolate chips.
- Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart onto cookie sheets and bake 9 to 12 minutes or until edges are set. Let cool 3 minutes; remove from cookie sheets to cooling racks. Store tightly covered.
Sheri
ops, ignore my post above
Sheri
have you tried these yet Anna?
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/04/david-lebovitzs-chocolate-chip-cookies-recipe.html?ref=se-bb2
Marianne
My husband just made these cookies, so good! It's a keeper (the recipe and my hubby!!)
Anna
Eric, thanks for listening and responding to the feedback.
Speaking of templates, Kara -- I will work on the phone issue. Thanks for letting me know!
TBSP Eric
Hello All - I work on Tablespoon.com and helped build the recipe template that Anna used in this post. We really appreciate all of the feedback on the recipe format. We built it to help bloggers like Cookie Exchange have a standard format, and make it easier for readers to share and print recipes.
Sounds like we've got a couple things to work on.
1. Internet Explorer 8 - Sorry that is not displaying for you. We're going to test this and make sure that it works in IE8.
2. Print too long - We're going to remove nutritional info so the print page is much shorter. We agree – printing two pages is too much for a short recipe.
3. Width of template - We hear you on this. We're going to look into making options with different widths. We made the width smaller so it would fit in all blogs, but it does get really long on a blog like Cookie Exchange.
4. Cut and paste – We wish we could figure out a way to make this easier, but it’s a bit out of our technical control. If you’re looking for a better version, you could cut and paste it from the print page or from the recipe on Tablespoon.
Again, thanks for all the feedback. It's really great to hear what you like and don't like. Feel free to give us more feedback here or over at our blog on Tablespoon.
TBSP Eric
kara
These look good Anna. Fyi, the new website format doesn't display well on my phone browser. I look at your website via phone every day and haven't been able to look at it since the change 🙁
Michelle
It doesn't even seem like real cooking unless you make it from scratch, just dumping and mixing. . . not that that's bad. I dump and mix too, but still it doesn't ahve the same art as cooking.
Tanis
I love the Nutella, but like you would like to actually taste it. Do you have any recipes with it?
On the new format, I guess I could get used to it, no one usually likes change, but I do actually prefer your previous recipe format. Just my opinion. Keep on keeping on.
LinC
Love the cookie ingredients! I could see the picture of the cookie, but the recipe block didn't display in my browser at all (IE 8). Please go back to regular text.
Sheila in MD
I didn't care for the new recipe format either...I printed it and it was 2 pages...to me, a recipe that length should not be two. I tried to cut and paste in Word and yes, formatting was a mess. But I do love your blog:-).
Anna
Cindy, it souns like you and I use the same method of copying recipes. I'm not going to use this layout permanently, but I thought it was kind of neat.
Amanda
Hey love the new look of your blog and thanks for featuring me on your side bar! SMOOOOOCH!! 😀
These sounds fabulous. Anything with massive amounts of chocolate is good in my book LOL 🙂
Cindy
I don't care for the new recipe layout. If I want to copy a recipe to add to my "Make This" list it goes nuts and I have to do a lot of reformatting.
Recipe sounds interesting although I like to bake "from scratch" - especially cookies.
melissa
I like that recipe layout. Thanks for the link!
Barbara
I know the point is to use Pillsbury products and back in the days when I was raising my kids, I often liked shortcut recipes; I used to collect the Bake-Off booklets.
But I agree that now I like things from scratch and would much prefer items starting with flour. Two separate contests would be a great idea!
Amy
Your cookies look great! I hope you liked the cookies as much as I did. I only tried them warm and thought they were very good. I think the new recipe format is nice, it's very succinct and visually appealing.
Pam
I have noticed over the years that the BakeOff has changed it's emphasis from made from scratch to using more of their convenience products. I suppose this makes sense from a marketing standpoint since they want to sell their products, but as a baker, I wish more credit was given to those of us who like to create original recipes. I like Katrina's suggestion of 2 different competitions or 2 different categories.
Katrina
I think Pillsbury should have two separate bake-offs. One with all their pre-made products and one for only homemade, from-scratch recipes. Just a thought.
That is a fun recipe format.
And I totally agree, I have a hard time using Nutella when it's baked in something because I'd rather have it plain on a spoon or spread on something. That said, I made some Soft Nutella Peanut Butter Cookies over the holidays from Amanda's Cookin' that were fantastic and the Nutella taste came through. I added extra Nutella and cut the pb in her recipe. They were great soft/chewy cookies and I had many people rave about them who got to taste them.