TWD: Chocolate Whopper Malted Drops

This is a redux recipe for me. Last year sometime, I started seeing these cookies on other blogs and I thought... wow... now that's an exciting cookie. What a great idea, right? Chocolate and malt in a cookie? I expected this wonderful chewy explosion of malty chocolatey goodness in my mouth but instead I wound up with gummy hardness in my teeth. They didn't taste chocolate-y enough, they didn't taste malt-y enough. Basically... they were merely a figment of what I thought a true malted chocolate chip cookie could be. Sigh.

So, when Rachel of Confessions of a Tangerine Tart chose this recipe for Tuesdays with Dorie I looked at this as an opportunity to make this cookie work. Maybe I did something wrong the first time?

I remember when I first bought Dorie's book and I was skimming through it, I noticed that the pictures she had of these particularly cookies didn't look anything like my first attempt (which I had made from a printed out recipe from a blog). So, i started thinking about what I needed to do to make my cookies better. First, I decided to lower the oven temperature. I felt like the malt in the cookies hardened too much initially and secondly, I decided to use dark chocolate cocoa powder instead of regular. Maybe that would boost the chocolate flavor.

These ideas in mind, I started to whip these cookies up. I wanted to pre-heat my oven while I was mixing the cookies and when I looked in the book I didn't see an oven temperature listed. I looked and looked and finally decided that it must be an error. There was no oven temperature listed. Hmph. I pulled out the old recipe that I had printed out from the internet and it listed 350 as the temperature (but, I wonder... how did they know?) so I decided that that was a safe temperature to start from and with my decision to lower the original temperature, I set my oven to 325 degrees.

These cookies are easy to make.

Well, except for chopping up the Whoppers. Jeez. That's time consuming alright.. Especially when you end up eating every third or fourth Whopper and especially when your Whoppers are wrapped in packages of 3. So, you have to open a new wrapper every 3rd Whopper. (Do yourself a favor and buy the box of whoppers and not the candy bar bag).

I also decided to pop the dough in the fridge for about 10 minutes before I put them in the oven. I just thought that maybe firming up the dough a bit would make for a sturdier cookie.

These cookies turned out much better this time around. They are chewy (not gummy) and they are definitely prettier than my earlier attempt. These are like a grown up malt cookie. It's like... they are too salty or something. Maybe I should have upped the sugar since I used dark cocoa. So, if you like a slightly salty chocolate cookie, you'd probably like these. For sugar fiends like myself, though... they still didn't live up to my original expectations. (Aside from the texture and the whoppers, I barely tasted malt!)

Check out Rachel's Blog for the recipe!