Salted Chocolate Chip Cookies

When someone gets a new job, people will often celebrate with dinners and drinks. I imagine in the olden days, or maybe in some industries, that people might give them a new briefcase. I like to celebrate with baked goods.

This week’s recipe is one such set of celebratory baked goods. These are new job cookies. (Kinda like new car smell, except you eat them, and they’re really hard to drive.) My wife started a new job. Yay! It’s really exciting and interesting, and if you see her, you should ask her about it.

Aquafaba.

The cookies, while not as exciting and interesting as her job, are pretty darn good. They’re also pretty easy, what I would call weeknight cookies. By that I mean you can make them on a weeknight, which I did. It was about an hour from start to finish.

D’oh!

Now, if you look closely at the first picture, you might notice a can of garbanzo beans, aka chickpeas. But don’t let that fool you, there are no chickpeas in the cookies. Well, not exactly. I didn’t have any eggs, and since the recipe only called for one egg, it didn’t make sense to get a whole package. So, I decided to try something I had heard of. It’s a vegan egg substitute called aquafaba.

Cookie scoops make easy work out of forming cookies.

Don’t let the fancy name fool you. Aquafaba is just the name given to the liquid from a can of chickpeas (or any other bean) that you would normally just discard. I know it sounds weird, but everyone was raving about it. So even though I’m not vegan, I thought I would give it a shot. 3 tbsp of aquafaba equals one egg. The consistency is actually strangely similar to egg whites. And, I hope I don’t spoil the surprise up front by saying so, but it worked out great.

Unbaked cookie close-up.

Even though I didn’t use eggs, the cookies were not vegan. I used butter, but otherwise they would have been vegan. Vegan butter substitutes are easy to find, so you could easily make these cookies vegan if you wanted to.

Aren’t they pretty?

I also thought it was awesome that the cookies had to bake at 360 °F. That’s right, 360. Because 350 just wasn’t hot enough. These cookies weren’t too cool for school, they were too hot to trot.

Omnomnomnomnom.

I made a few changes to the recipe, mostly based on what I had on hand. In case you’re following along with the original recipe (linked below), I thought I’d point out some of the changes. I melted the butter before using it, because I thought I would mix the cookies by hand. (I ended up using the hand mixer anyway.) I didn’t have any turbinado sugar, so I used more regular sugar. I was 3 grams short on brown sugar, so I used more regular sugar for that as well. I used sea salt not table salt in the cookies.

I sometimes use chopped up chocolate as a substitute for chocolate chips. Interestingly enough, this time it was the other way around, as I didn’t have any chocolate bars to chop up, but I did have chocolate chips. I barely had to mix the butter and sugar. The dough did not look crumbly when the recipe said it would. It actually looked fine.

I used a bigger (2 tbsp) cookie scoop to make the cookies. (The one I got from the competition.) I didn’t fill it quite all the way, but mostly. It made things much easier. And it made the cookies look all pretty and such. I baked them for 12 minutes and ended up with 18 cookies.

Baked cookie close-up. Check out that salt.

Keen-eyed observers might notice there aren’t 18 cookies in the pictures. That’s not because I can’t count, it’s because we ate a few before they were all done baking. (I had made them one sheet at a time.) They were still a little bit warm when we ate them.

They were nice and gooey on the inside and a little crisp on the outside. They were quite yummy. “These are so good,” my wife kept repeating. There was yummy chocolate with the salt as a nice counterpoint. You would never have known there was anything even remotely related to a chickpea in them. In short, they were delicious.

Cookies like to smile. 🙂

One more thing about the chocolate. You might not be able to tell from the pictures, but these cookies had a lot of chocolate in them. They were hard to pick up without getting chocolate on your hands. As my wife said, “These are chocolate lover’s cookies.” The amount of chocolate to cookie was “a good ratio” as she described it.

So, if you’re looking for an interesting variation on ye olde favorite chocolate chip cookie, this is definitely worth checking out. If you like a chocolate chip cookie with lots of chocolate, this is definitely worth checking out. And if you’re looking for an egg substitute for any reason, I can heartily recommend aquafaba. And if you’ve got any other interesting chocolate chip cookie variations or egg substitutes, let me know!

Recipe courtesy of smitten kitchen.