Man-Sized Double Chocolate Cookies: or, The accidental cake

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are following the recommendations of Pieathlon friends! As fiendish as some of us get (myself included) when picking Pieathlon recipes, the last time we got a recipe from someone who also did a Pieathlon, it turned out really easy and really good. Today, we are taking a suggestion from Poppy Crocker, who said we really ought to try...

Man-Sized Double Chocolate Cookies ½ c margarine* 2½ oz unsweetened chocolate 1 c sugar 1 tsp vanilla 2 eggs 2 c sifted flour 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp baking soda ½ c buttermilk Heat oven to 350°. Grease a cookie sheet. Melt margarine and chocolate together. You can do this in the microwave (stopping and stirring every 15 seconds until completely melted). Or, you can melt them on the stove over low heat. Whether you use a saucepan or a microwave-safe bowl, use one large enough to hold all of the dough. Add sugar, baking powder, and baking soda. Mix thoroughly. Add vanilla and eggs, mix well. Alternately add the flour and buttermilk to the dough. Mix well. Drop by large tablespoonfuls (as in, 2 heaping tablespoons per cookie) onto the baking sheet, about 2 inches apart. Bake about 12 minutes. When cool, frost with the following:        Chocolate Frosting: 2 tbsp margarine* 3 oz unsweetened chocolate 3 c sifted powdered sugar 4 tbsp milk Melt margarine and chocolate. Blend sugar and milk in a small bowl. Add the hot chocolate mixture, mix well. Let stand, stirring occasionally, until it's the right consistency to spread on cookies. If it becomes too thick, add milk and mix well. *Use the margarine that comes in sticks, not the spreadable kind that comes in tubs.    Note:   You can substitute cocoa powder for unsweetened chocolate. For the cookies, use 5 tbsp of cocoa and and add an extra 2 tbsp margarine. For the icing, use 9 tbsp cocoa (that's 1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp) and an extra 3 tbsp margarine.    Note 2:   If you double the buttermilk, this makes a very good chocolate cake. Bake it in a greased 9" square pan. Our Best Cooky Recipes by Martha Logan, Swift and Company, 1962 via Grannie Pantries

These cookies come from a Swift and Co recipe handout credited to "Martha Logan." It seems that after General Mills found massive success with a fictitious lady mascot (I refer of course to Betty Crocker), other industrial food companies tried to come up with their own nonexistent women with names carefully designed to sound matronly. Swift and Co gave us "Martha Logan," who definitely sounds like someone I'd get a cookie recipe and borrow an egg from.

I'm surprised the Martha Logan people don't use lard in this recipe since Swift and Co specialized in meat and meat byproducts. Instead we use margarine, which I was only too happy to get because it now costs less than half the price of butter. For once, I remembered to set out the margarine so it could soften before commencing. Then I read the recipe, which says we are supposed to melt it.

Well that was pointless.

You may notice that contrary to the recipe directions, we are not melting chocolate alongside the margarine. Like many people, we at A Book of Cookrye went the more economical route and substituted in cocoa powder. After a quick stir, the proto-batter was as swoon-inducingly lovely as if we'd never fudged the ingredients.

Oh that looks good.

We never use buttermilk around here, and I was not about to purchase a whole carton of the stuff just to use a quarter cup of it and eventually pour the rest of it down the drain after it expired. We still had a bit of sour cream left over from the Piathlon. I figured if I used half that and half water, it would theoretically average out to buttermilk.

Dumping water into chocolate batter looks wrong, doesn't it? Any time I add water to a recipe it feels like a mild transgression. I know that makes no sense. After all, the milk in cake batter is like mostly water. But for some reason, pouring in colorless, odorless, tasteless water feels like I am messing with that which oughtn't be messed with.

Oh, the ruination.

Well, it turns out adding the water was wrong. Due to mathematical carelessness, I halved all the ingredients except the buttermilk. Watering down the cookie dough made it uselessly runny.

Never has something so wrong looked so right.

With the cookies already ruined and the oven already heated up, we had 4 choices. Our first choice: put the "cookie dough" in the refrigerator and hope it hardens like the chocolate frosted drops. Second: hastily mix all the non-buttermilk ingredients, combine the two batches, and hope it averages out. Third: throw out the whole business and deny everything. Fourth: put what we have in a cake pan, which might turn out terrible but would at least be contained from spilling in the oven. 

I went ahead and commenced the icing as soon as I closed the oven door on our impending failure. In theory, the icing could "let stand, stirring occasionally, until of right consistency" while the not-cookies baked and cooled. When I mixed the powdered sugar and milk in bowl #1, I began suspecting that the icing would need no standing time. The icing already stood on its own before we added the chocolate to it.

Kind of looks like soft-serve, doesn't it?

The finished icing reminded me of the boiled blackberry pudding. Its instructions tell you to add flour "enough to make the spoon stand in the batter." 

Meanwhile, the "cookies" had defied my expectations. I thought we would get a dense, brownie-ish chocolate thing, but instead we got a puffy, airy-looking chocolate cake.

As I waited for the surprise cake to cool, a number of people approached the icing bowl with spoon in hand. I have never seen anyone look so happy from a tiny spoonful of icing. This tasted like the best fudge you ever made. I think it would be amazing spread between two yellow cake layers, or on top of cupcakes. But since I didn't have any of those at the moment, I spread the icing on this chocolate cake instead.

The icing was hopelessly, unworkably thick. You may as well try to smear modeling clay on top of a cake. I know the recipe says to thin it with a little milk if needed, but the icing was so rich, so fudgy, and so creamy that I couldn't tamper with perfection. Instead, I microwaved the icing until it melted a bit.

This is the most diet-friendly chocolate cake I have ever made. By "diet-friendly" I mean large pieces of cake kept disappearing whenever I wasn't looking. Chocolate cake cannot tempt you when it's already gone. You would never think such a delicious cake was a recipe error. It was light and airy in texture, but marvelously rich and dark in taste. People were asking when I will make the cake again. Because I can never keep my yap shut when I nearly ruin food, I of course blabbed that this delicious cake was supposed to be cookies until I did not correctly halve all the ingredients. The response: "Well, you need to make that mathematical error again!"

But we weren't sent a cake recipe. We were sent a cookie recipe. And I wanted to see what happens if we make the recipe again, but actually follow the directions. The resulting cookie dough, if you actually use the measurements given in the recipe, was ever-so-slightly runny. Like, it could almost hold a shape, but it drooped if you held it on a spoon for very long.

I contemplated refrigerating the cookie dough, but the recipe does not tell us to. Presumably the staff at Swift and Co's test kitchen thoroughly tested this recipe, and determined that we need not involve the refrigerator. But in case these cookies spread out a lot, I gave them far more space than I usually do when baking. I also deliberately used a cookie sheet with raised edged on all four sides because I was almost certain that a hot drippy mess awaited after a few minutes in the oven. I know that drop cookies are a bit runnier than the ones you have to properly shape before baking, but these seemed... well, too runny. Or maybe I was just worrying too much after I ruined the previous attempt at this recipe.

The cookies didn't even slightly slump in the oven, much less spread out. I would say you should flatten these a bit if you want them to look more cookie-like, but you would probably end up with a sticky mess instead. If I felt fancy, I might pipe this cookie dough out instead of just spoon-dropping it.

They're such near-perfect domes, aren't they? I was a bit disappointed they didn't spread out and look a bit more, well, cookie-like. But we have to discuss something about the recipe results. Here is our lovely tray of cookies right after we turned off the oven and put away the pan. You will note that we had to get out the big platter.

We have 17 cookies on this tray. Keep in mind that we halved the recipe, meaning we should only have nine of them. This is a rare moment at A Book of Cookrye. Between my deliberately terrible bowl-scraping (if you don't leave batter on the bowl to lick, why did you even start baking?) and my habit of measuring portions of cookie dough with a far more generous hand than recipes tell me to, I almost always get far fewer cookies than the purported yield. However, I got nearly twice what this recipe says I should have. Clearly my cookies aren't man-sized enough, and I will have to make them big enough to use as dinner plates next time.

You should know that I doubled the icing recipe and figured any extra could go into the freezer. This is all the icing that was left after the last cookie was properly dressed. Note that I had to get out the rubber spatula before instead of after finishing the cookies.

So if you're going to make this recipe, I suggest you double the icing (I already doubled the amounts when I typed out the recipe). You can just put any extra in a plastic bag, squeeze out the air, and freeze it until you want it. But unless you spread it very thin, you may not have to worry about surplus icing any more than I did.

But enough about that. Look at how delicious these are!

As we ate them, one person said "Yeah, I can see how these turned into a cake last time." These cookies are like eating the tops of cupcakes. 

The only thing I didn't like was that I didn't have anywhere to go and give these away (keep in mind that we accidentally made twice as many cookies as we planned). But these were just as diet-friendly as the cake made from the same recipe. One person said "Great. Now I'm going to keep stuffing my face with these until they're gone." Another person ate one, immediately looked blissful, and simply said "Good cake-cookies."

I very likely will make these again. It's nice to know that I can make delicious chocolate cookies without endangering the wreckage of my pre-pandemic figure because everyone else likes them as much as I do.