Cue cookie craving: with crisp edges, chewy centers, and a hidden pocket of rich chocolate ganache baked right in the middle, you should probably go make some, like, now.
If you thought classic chocolate chip cookies couldn’t get any more perfect, think again! I’ve gone and stuffed them with chocolate ganache and the results are mind-blowing (and tongue-pleasing).
I’m seriously obsessed with stuffed cookies… if you hadn’t already noticed.
These particular stuffed cookies may not be quite as an unusual flavor combination as some of my others (ahem, black sesame and matcha) but they are surely not your typical chocolate chip cookie.
Might I suggest serving these without mentioning what’s inside; your friends will think they’re biting into what looks like the most perfect chocolate chip cookie on earth (the flake sea salt on top is dazzling enough as is), but once they hit that pocket of rich ganache, well, the surprised and delighted look on their face is priceless.
Yes, chocolate chip cookies are always amazing right out of the oven, but this is one cookie where I actually prefer it cooled.
Hear me out!
You might think that molten ganache is a good thing, but it doesn’t behave like plain melted chocolate would. When it’s hot, the ganache filling has a bit of a greasy/separated feel that ‘breaks’ rather than oozes. Guessing this is due to the fact that ganache is not very stable at high temperatures (if you’ve ever overheated your ganache and ended up with a greasy mess you know what I mean here).
Luckily, when the cookies are fully cooled, the ganache settles into a soft and smooth chocolate center that’s simply perfection.
I did opt to use mini chocolate chips here even though these are full size cookies. The reasoning behind this choice is that the cookies are more flexible and easier to stuff with smaller bits of chocolate than with larger ones.
Plus, the diminutive chips make the massive core of ganache even more apparent.
Interestingly enough I tested the exact same recipe using both creamed butter and melted butter. Both tasted delicious, but the melted butter dough baked up much more consistently (with the creamed butter, my first pan was beautiful, but my second spread like crepes). Consistency is always a good thing in my book, so melted butter it is!
Bonus that you don’t have to worry about bringing your butter to room temperature first, just cut it up into cubes and melt half of it, then stir in the remaining cubes until they melt from the residual heat, at the same time bringing down the temperature of the melted butter to about 90 degrees.
Since this dough uses melted butter, it won’t ‘cream’ like other cookie recipes. However, you still want to mix it for a good 3 to 5 minutes. You can sort of see in the images above how the batter will lighten in color ever so slightly; it’ll also appear more homogenous and less greasy than when you first added the melted butter.
The stuffing technique is nothing new, I’ve used it many times before with many different kinds of fillings (from maraschino cherries to chunks of marzipan).
Basically, you split your ball of dough in half, flatten the pieces into pancakes, then wrap them around the filling which has been frozen until it’s totally firm. You want to really seal the dough around the filling so it doesn’t leak out as it bakes.
I piped dollops of the ganache to achieve a more even shape, but you can also scoop it by the teaspoonful as well (just be sure you’ve let it cool enough so it holds its shape).
The stuffed balls of cookie dough can also be shaped and then frozen to bake later (I didn’t actually get to test baking them from frozen because we had to dump our entire freezer after the power went out for 5 days – however it’s typically about 2 minutes additional bake time to bake a cookie directly from frozen dough).
Can you make these without the ganache filling?
Certainly (they’re based on my classic go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe that’s fabulous in its own right).
If your cookies spread out more than you’d like, use the spoon trick: as soon as they come out of the oven and are still hot and pliable, use the inner curves of two large spoons to press the edges of the cookie back in, giving them a perfectly round, perfectly wrinkled appearance.
Let us know what you think!
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