Chewy Chunky Salted Caramel Choc Chip Cookies
An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott
Preparation time: 30 minutes plus overnight chilling
Cooking time: 16 minutes per tray
Makes around 20 cookies
- 2 cups/250g/8.8ozs. plain all purpose flour
- 1 1/4 teaspoons fine salt (use 1/2 teaspoon if not making salted caramel cookies)
- 1/2 teaspoon bicarb of soda
- 170g/6ozs. butter, melted
- 1 cup/155g/5.5ozs. brown sugar
- 1/2 cup/110g/3.9ozs. caster or superfine sugar
- 2 tablespoons vanilla extract or paste
- 1 large egg
- 1 egg yolk
- 250g/8.8ozs. Salted Caramel chocolate block (I used a Whittakers 62% Salted Caramel dark chocolate block)
- 1/4 cup/40g/1.4ozs. sesame seeds
Step 1 - Whisk the flour, salt and bicarb together in a jug. In a large bowl whisk the butter, both sugars, vanilla, egg and egg yolk until no lumps remain. Add the butter mix to the flour and mix until well incorporated. Place this cookie dough in the fridge overnight.
Step 2 - The next day take the cookie dough out of the fridge 30 minutes before you want to bake them. Preheat oven to 160C/320F and line 2-3 trays with parchment.
Step 3 - Roll walnut sized balls of dough and add two chunks of the chocolate per ball. If you're rolling it in sesame seeds roll them into balls and then roll in the sesame seeds. Place six balls of dough per cookie sheet as they spread a lot. Bake for 15-16 minutes. The bottoms may have a soft caramel finish to them so use a cake lifter to lift them off the parchment.
Personal Note
Speaking of cookies, I've always wanted to try Girl Scout Cookies. As an avid consumer of American television during my childhood Girl Scout cookies featured heavily. Ivy is part of an American expat group on Facebook and she said that they were shipping over a whole lot of these and she asked did I want in on them? I answered back "YES!" as fast as my chubby fingers could type (okay my fingers aren't chubby but they are chubby in spirit).
They arrived a few months later and the timing could not have been better. We were in week 3 of our self imposed hibernation and I was going a bit crazy (see ladybird story).
"Guess what I've got?" Ivy messaged. She had boxes of those cookies in her hot little hands! I made a time to go pick them up the next day and let her know that I was on my way. When I arrived at her apartment block I let her know that I was downstairs. We were doing a contactless drop but I wasn't sure which gate she was going to appear from so I waited in the car.
"Look up," came the message.
I looked up and there was Ivy, on her third floor apartment lowering down a bucket on a string containing four boxes of girl scout cookies and a giant sunflower! Talk about clever!
I couldn't stop laughing, even the people jogging past couldn't resist cracking a smile. We had a brief chat before my neck started hurting too much from squinting up at her and then I took my exciting bounty home. Stay tuned for my own version of my favourite Girl Scout Cookies and in the meantime I hope you'll give these cookies a try!
So tell me Dear Reader, what is the chocolate bar that you would add to this cookie?