World Peace Cookies

I'll just add my hurrahs to this recipe. These are very, very good cookies. I've done them with fleur de sel and the little nuggets of saltiness are just perfect. I imagine kosher salt would work just as well.

I was extra careful not to overmix them and they ended up tender and crumbly. They didn't look too much like Deb's smooth versions on Smitten Kitchen, however - mine are fissured and cracked. Taste trumps all though.

I did one batch on parchment and one batch on Silpat and preferred the parchment ones. I find that buttery cookies on Silpat have a tendency to spread out more and sometimes get too thin and burned at the edges.

Chocolate heaven.

The many 5-star reviews led me to make these cookies. I did weigh my ingredients, but my dough was very crumbly. I over-mixed mine (my single biggest cooking problem -- plunging in and doing things before I read it carefully). The instruction suggest covering your bowl with a dish towel and pulsing your mixer on and off. I use those old 1940's pyrex mixing bowls, though, which are low and wide. So I used two sheets of plastic wrap (one on each side). I was so thrilled that there wasn't flour everywhere I just kept on mixing.

More than half my cookies were a pile of crumbs that I compressed into a blob. Cooked up fine, but not pretty. The other half were less crumbly, and looked ok. But they all tasted amazing.

I used regular chocolate chips (chopped up). I think the suggestion of crunchy salt is a very good one.

I like these cookies a lot- made them three times so far. I've found that they're best if three things are followed:

First, the chopped chocolate/chips should be 53-60% dark chocolate, as the cookie base isn't very sweet and anything with a higher cacao percentage makes them too bitter and unbalanced.

Second, they really are better with the fleur de sel, as the crunchiness remains in the finished cookie and somehow the quanitity is perfect. When I made them with fine sea salt the amount wasn't quite right, tastewise, and they lacked that special crunch.

Third, beg, borrow or steal a scale, because they also have a better texture if you weigh ingredients. The volume measure for the brown sugar is not an accurate translation from the weights that this recipe was originally developed with, but rather a next-best-thing approximation.