Almost every day, my husband asks me to make him some type of baked good. Almost every day he doesn’t get said baked good. You can call me an awful wife, but I am looking out for both of our waistlines and general health, because I know what happens whenever I bake. Very quickly the one brownie we were planning to share turns into us sneaking into the kitchen and taking little bites out of the pan and usually within 48 hours the treat that was supposed to last a week has found a new home in our stomachs.
I do love baking (like, LOVE baking), so for special occasions or when we have to bring something for a dinner party, I let him request whatever he wants. Thursday was his birthday and after a weekend with the boys, he declared yesterday, “I want salted caramel chocolate chip cookies.” “Hmm,” I thought. I looked in my cookbooks, no dice. I tried looking online for a good recipe, but every one I found just looked “eh.” After my search didn’t bear fruit, I decided to give it the old college try and just make a recipe up. I chose to stuff the cookies rather than top them with more chocolate and salted caramel because I didn’t want the caramel to just get absorbed by the cookie dough or run all over the top of the cookie. Luckily they turned out pretty good (if I do say so myself!) and hubs got his sweet fix for at least a few days. I’m sure by Wednesday the cookies will be gone and we’ll be back to our game of cat and mouse.
Recipe:
- 1 5.5 ounce bag of caramels (I bought the generic version from Walgreen’s)
- 1 teaspoon sea salt plus more for sprinkling atop cookies
- 1 semi sweet chocolate bar
- 2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 3/4 cup brown sugar, packed tight
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs, room temperature
- 1 12 ounce package of semi-sweet chocolate chips
First preheat the oven to 375. Then start cutting the caramels into small pieces, putting them in a bowl, and tossing the cut-up caramel with sea salt. Once the salt is distributed evenly, put the bowl in the freezer. The reason I did this was to keep the caramel from sticking together and to make it easier to use. If you can find baking caramel, you can probably skip this step because you buy it in a much firmer state. The caramel I bought was very soft.
Next break the chocolate bar into small chunks. You can use a mallet, but be careful not to let pieces fly. I tried using one and a piece almost landed in my trusty sidekick’s mouth.
Once the chunks are done, put them aside and somewhere far from the oven. I don’t know about you, but in my little city kitchen, heat gets trapped pretty easily. If the chocolate is close to any heat source, it can start to melt.
After that, mix the flour, salt, and baking soda. In a separate bowl, mix the two types of sugars (and seriously, pack the you know what out of that brown sugar….ain’t no one EVER complain of too much of the brown stuff), butter, and vanilla. Add the eggs slowly and keep the mixer on level one.
Next start adding in the flour mixture to the wet mixture, but seriously, don’t put too much dry mix in at once. Why, you ask? Because it’s harder to distribute the dry ingredients evenly if they all go in at once, which will make your dough weird…and who likes weird cookies?
Once you’ve got the dry into the wet, pour in the chocolate chips and mix, mix, mix!
Now here comes the fun part! Using an ice cream scooper, take a hunk of dough and put it on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Take the rounded edge of the scooper and make a little divot in the dough and place a few pieces of the chocolate on top, then cover the chocolate with a few pieces of the caramel. Next take a smaller amount of cookie dough and flatten it in the palm of your hand. Take the flattened dough and cover the chocolate and caramel, making sure that they are completely surrounded by cookie dough.
If the dough has gotten warm and becomes a little soft and hard to mold, cover the formed cookies with the ice cream scooper and push as if you were releasing ice cream. They will be perfectly round on the top. Once the cookies are in the shape you want them, lightly sprinkle them with sea salt and put them in the oven on a middle rack for 11 minutes.
Leave a LOT of space in between cookies, because these things come out massive. I put one next to my phone below for scale.
Let the cookies cool completely before you dig in. They will come out soft and a because they are big, they can break easily. The caramel will have melted, but will stay in the center of the cookie and be an extra “kapow!” when bit into. Enjoy!
