{TWD} Chocolate Whopper Malted cookies

Oh, Dorie, you are a victim of your own chocolate cookie perfection. We discovered your World Peace Cookies earlier this summer, and they have pretty much spoiled me for other chocolate/chocolate cookies!

We've made numerous batches of World Peace Cookies (recipe online here) and have served them to several gatherings of friends (one group call them "Peace cookies", the other calls them "those salty cookies"). These cookies are amazing! Everybody LOVES them! Why am I waxing eloquent about a cookie that was NOT this week's challenge? Well, it would be no easy task to knock the World Peace Cookies off their chocolate cookie pedestal. And, imo, the Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops were not up to the challenge.

For the recipe I used:
Hershey's Special Dark cocoa powder
Callebaut bittersweet chocolate, chopped
Whoppers (some cut in half, others in quarters)
Ovaltine

Preparation notes:
- the dough was VERY sticky
- the cookies puffed up in the oven
- the cookies softened overnight, but I don't know if that's because I covered them too soon (I thought they were fully cooled.)
- the malted milk balls sort of melted and caramelized as they baked. (I thought this was the best part)

The Verdict:
Overall, I'd rate them a VG.

They were very rich, and there was almost too much going on, especially when they were warm. Some of the richness might have come from the Special Dark cocoa powder we used. I liked them better once they cooled (but maybe that's how I feel about most cookies? That seems weird.)

I don't like malt flavor and luckily the malt taste was not very strong in these cookies. It seemed more pronounced when they were warm. If I were making them again, I'd use Nesquik rather than Ovaltine, to reduce the malt factor.

The cookies softened a LOT overnight - maybe I covered them too soon, or shouldn't have put them in two layers (they were separated by parchment)? The next day I let them sit in the air and that firmed them a little, but they were still distressingly soft for me. Of course that didn't stop me from eating them. A lot of them.

I served these as part of a dinner party a couple of weeks ago. When our guests saw them, they were very excited that I'd made "the salty cookies"; I had to break it to them gently that these were not the World Peace cookies. They got over their disappointment fairly quickly. Most everyone seemed to like them. I sent some home with them.

One guest, H, makes a similar cookie with malted milk balls and she said these were better. In fact, she made Dorie's version with her children the next day! Another guest, S, said that nothing can compare to the World Peace cookies. She has bought herself some fleur de sel to make those soon.

I tried making ice cream sandwiches with these cookies (and vanilla/honey ice cream) and I realized that I should have paid more attention when people have said how they did it. In the freezer my ice cream melted out from in between the cookies and made a total disaster. I found one of the sandwiches in the recesses of my freezer this weekend, and it actually was pretty tasty. But not pretty looking.

The bottom line for me:
These are quite acceptable cookies (and I personally polished off what I didn't give away) but ultimately Dorie's World Peace Cookies continue to reign unchallenged in their sublime chocolate perfection. I will be VERY interested to see how the Chocolate Chunkers (next week's challenge) turn out. The recipe seems similar to Dorie's Quintuple Chocolate Brownies, and I loved those.

Thanks to Rachel of Confessions of a Tangerine Tart for hosting this week. Check out her post for the Chocolate Whopper Malted Drops recipe or find it on page 85 of Dorie Greenspan's oh-so-fabulous book, Baking From My Home to Yours. To see how a couple hundred others baked this recipe, visit the TWD blogroll.