Cool Ghouls Book Club

I spent my Valentine’s Day evening baking cookies for the “heart healthy” themed potluck at work on Friday. I read somewhere that dark chocolate is a heart healthy food. Loophole! I decided I’d bake triple chocolate chunk cookies, chock full of dark chocolate baking cocoa, semisweet chocolate chips and chunks, and a last minute tweak to the recipe, salted caramel chips.

The tweak came about when I gathered my ingredients and found that I only had half a bag of chunks and that wasn’t enough for a double batch of cookies. There were plenty of other chips to choose from in my baking supply cart. Cinnamon? Mint? Caramel bits? Any of them would have been great, but I went with salted caramel because these cookies are insanely rich and I thought little salty bits would complement the chocolate overload best.

I learned that two batches in one bowl is too much for my mixer to handle and ended up stirring it up the old fashioned way. Yes, there was a little flour left at the bottom of the bowl. Cookie dough is tough to stir!

Since I was short on chunks, I used what I had to decorate the tops of the cookies. As you can see, I ran out of chunks a couple trays in and decorated the rest with chips.

Note: this recipe calls for cake flour. If you do not have cake flour ( I didn’t), you can make your own. For every cup of cake flour, put two tablespoons of cornstarch into your measuring cup and top it off with all purpose flour. Sift together. Voila! You now have cake flour.

This is the second time I’ve made these cookies. Chocolate makes my heart happy, and the salted caramel chips complemented these cookies perfectly.