| Prep Time | 20 minutes |
| Cook Time | 24-32 minutes |
| Passive Time | 20+ minutes |
| Servings |
3-4 dozen
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- 1 cup Butter
- 2/3 cup cocoa powder 60 grams
- 2 large eggs
- 1-1/2 cups sugar
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 2-1/4 cups all purpose or baking flour 315 grams
- 2 tsp. baking soda
- 1 tsp. cream of tartar
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1 cup granulated sugar
Ingredients
First group of ingredients:
Second group of ingredients:
Dry ingredients:
For dough rolling:
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- Melt the butter over low heat. You can do this in the microwave also, but I prefer the stovetop. Once the butter is melted, add the cocoa powder and blend it in. Set aside to cool.
- Place the eggs, sugar, and vanilla in to your mixer bowl. I crack my eggs in a clear or dark colored bowl in order to be able to see if I have any hitchhiker egg shells. If you crack the eggs straight in to the mix, you may get a rogue shell that will potentially ruin your Brownie Cookie experience!
- Blend the eggs, sugar, and vanilla together. Make sure to keep blending until the mix is creamy and has incorporated a bit of air. The cookies will generally turn out lighter and fluffier if you do this.
- Add in the cooled butter/cocoa mixture. Note: make sure that the butter/cocoa mixture is cooled sufficiently! If it is too hot, you run the risk of cooking the eggs that are mixed in with the sugar and it will ruin the cookies. Blend together well.
- Mix your dry ingredients together prior to adding them. This will ensure that the smaller portioned ingredients mix together evenly with the flour. Mix in at low speed at first to avoid creating a dust cloud of flour. Recently I have been using baking flour. In the past I would only use all-purpose flour and the cookies turned out fine. Either will work, and I can not tell much of a difference between the two with this recipe.
- Turn up the speed to medium and blend the flour mixture in really good. After mixing, your cookie dough should look like this. It will be very soft and gooey. Scrape the sides of the bowl, put some cling wrap over it, and put it in to the fridge. The dough will keep for several days like this, but if you are like me and want to eat the cookies NOW, then you only need to wait about 20 minutes until the dough is a little more manageable. The refrigeration simply cools the butter down and allows you to roll the dough in to balls easier.
- Set up a workstation and get ready to roll! I use a cookie dough scoop in order to make all of my cookies a uniform size, but a spoon will work just fine. Scoop up some dough, then roll it together in your hands to make it round and smooth. I have tried to just scoop it out and not roll it in my hands, but the cookies don't turn out the same. Rolling them smooth is the only way to guarantee perfect results with this recipe!
- Pop the smooth dough ball in to a bowl of granulated sugar. Spin the dough ball around until it is fully covered with sugar. Now repeat this process until you have used up all of the dough!
- While your first rolled cookies are cooking, it is really easy to just finish rolling the rest of the cookie dough out. Your hands are already messy, so just finish up the messy work until it is done. You can even refrigerate or freeze the rolled out dough at this point if you want to cook them later.
- You may notice that I do not use my fancy baking sheet liners for these cookies while they are in the oven. I get the best results by placing them directly on an aluminum 1/2 sheet pan. I don't grease the pan or anything. You can use just about any kind of baking sheet you like, really. Just remember that if you are using a dark colored non-stick pan, keep a close watch while they are in the oven and adjust your baking time as necessary. Darker pans generally tend to cook things a bit faster and/or hotter.
- For perfect results, follow this instruction to the letter: bake at 350°F for 8 minutes. Unless you are trying to make gigantic cookies, this works every time! The cookies will be puffy when you take them out and look a bit moist in the middle, but they are done. Get them out of the oven!
- Once out of the oven, the cookies can stay on the cookie sheet for about 60 seconds. If you keep them on the hot cookie sheet much longer they will continue cooking and be a little bit dry. They only need a few seconds to cool before they can be scooped off of the cookie sheet cleanly. Cool and enjoy!
The story behind this recipe:
Around 1960, my Mom was already the best cookie chef to be found in Baltimore, Maryland. She had mastered snickerdoodles, but wanted a chocolate cookie in the same style. She set off on a mission to create a chocolate masterpiece, and after about 12-13 batches of failed attempts: success! The cookie recipe above was the end result which she named "Brownie Cookies." She used bits and pieces of her brownie recipe such as the melted butter/cocoa mixture to make it work.
As it so happens, a famous bake/cake mix manufacturer named Pillsbury hosted a competition of sorts around this time. Contestants were asked to mail in recipes, and a winner would be decided on and awarded some kind of notoriety or monetary prize. My mom freely sent in this recipe in to Pillsbury. She never heard anything back, and forgot all about the contest. This is where things get interesting.
In 1977 my family moved across the country to Hollister, California. During a pot-luck style church function that my mom was attending, someone brought some cookies that resembled hers, but had a bit different flavor and a powdered-sugar coating instead of the granulated sugar coating she typically used. She asked the woman who made the cookies where she found the recipe, and she replied, "Oh it was on a Pillsbury cake mix box!"
We like to speculate that powdered-sugar coated chocolate cookies, chocolate chocolate chip cookies, white chocolate macadamia chocolate cookies, and others seen in the commercial world today were all put in motion by my mom's brilliant recipe. I hope you enjoy these cookies as much as my entire family and countless others do!
Another funny note: I was accused of bringing bakery-made cookies to a baking contest at work when I brought these for the competition. Even though I was able to rattle off the recipe by heart, I was disqualified for cheating! My cookies were, "too good, too perfectly round, and clearly not home-made!" I could only laugh. It still brings a smile to my face. Thank you for the great recipe Mom!
Can you please share an eggless version of these cookies?
I’m sorry, but I really don’t have anything that I have tried. There are a lot of resources on the internet for egg substitutes though; please give one a try and let me know how it goes!