Chocolate. Cookies. Wine.
Or we could just combine all three into one recipe.
I've been waiting to try this recipe for quite a while and I finally gave in. I have to admit I was a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong, these are great chocolate cookies. The wine flavor just doesn't come through. I even tried refrigerating the dough overnight hoping the flavors would improve. They didn't. Next time I would just use dark coffee and call it good.
Speaking of coffee, I've also been dying to try stirring coffee beans into a batch of cookies. That's right, coffee beans. I saw another recipe for chocolate cookies that used whole coffee beans instead of chocolate chips. When the wine flavor didn't come through I decided to add slightly crushed coffee beans to the other half of the dough. The beans added a nice crunch to the dough. (Yes, I ate raw cookie dough. That's real life. But I can't tell you to do that.) In fact, they were a bit too crunchy, especially if you weren't expecting it. I was worried they would be too hard in the cookies so I let the dough sit overnight thinking the beans would soften. I enjoyed the added coffee flavor, but the beans were still too tough. If you're like me and you just have to try this, warn the people eating the cookies that they contain coffee beans.
These cookies are really dark, almost black, due to the dutch cocoa. Even dark chocolate chips look light brown when baked. To test this out for yourself, be sure to bite into a cookie while its still warm and the chips are all melted and gooey.
Share these with a friend and see if you can pick up on the wine flavor. Then decide you can't taste the Merlot and have another just to make sure. Annnnnd you might need a glass of Merlot with another cookie to triple check, but that's up to you.
Dark Chocolate Merlot Cookies
slightly adapted from Simply Scratch
Ingredients:
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup Dutch-processed baking cocoa (also called dark cocoa)
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup Merlot
1 cup dark chocolate chips (I was out of chips so I used a guesstimated amount of a chopped up Trader Joe's 72% dark chocolate bar)
*optional: 2-4 Tbsp whole coffee beans, slightly crushed (I put 2 Tbsp in half the recipe, see comments above)
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
* Combine flour, cocoa powder, salt and soda. Set aside.
* In a large bowl, cream together sugar, brown sugar and butter. Beat in egg, vanilla and Merlot.
* Add flour mixture and stir to combine. Stir in chocolate chips (and coffee beans if desired).
* Scoop rounded tablespoons of dough onto greased cookie sheets leaving 2 inches between cookies. (Because I found the batter to be very wet and was hoping for more flavor to develop I put the dough in the fridge to chill overnight. Using chilled dough also helped the cookies spread less. If you can't wait, just go for it, but your cookies will be thinner.)
* Bake 8-10 minutes. Cool slightly before removing to wire racks to cool completely. (but you should really try one before they cool... while they're still warm and the chocolate is all melty)
Food for Thought:
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."- Albert Einstein
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