2013 Cooking Club Week 47: Fleur de Sel cookies

Sorry this is a bit early but I'm working all weekend and won't get another chance to post it up.

In my opinion one of life's greatest pleasures is a freshly baked cookie. These are my all time favourite cookies, they're simple to make and I think the salt and the chocolate go really well together. They're an egg-free cookie so if anyone ever needs to bake something egg free these are a great option. The dough also freezes really, really well, I usually make quite a big batch, divide the dough into logs then bake some and freeze some. If you do freeze them just take them out a while before they need to be baked so that you can cut slices from the logs easily. This recipe makes two decent sized logs, I got 15 cookies from the first one so depending on how big you cut them it should yield about 30 cookies, obviously though it can be scaled depending on how much you need/want to make



Ingredients:
- 300g dark chocolate chips
- 350g flour
- 60g good quality cocoa powder
- 10g bicarbonate of soda
- 300g butter
- 240g demerara sugar
- 100g caster sugar
- 10g vanilla essence
- 6g fleur de sel (any good quality sea salt will be fine)

Method:
1. Soften the butter and cream it along with the sugars and salt. A stand mixer with a paddle attachment is the best, as you can leave it do it's thing for a few minutes, but I used just a hand mixer today and they came out fine.
2. Sieve together the soda, cocoa powder and flour and add it in slowly to the butter mixture. Make sure you don't overmix it, mix until it has almost come together then add the chocolate chips and mix it the final bit.

3. When all the ingredients are combined divide the mixture into two and begin to shape it into two logs, it may take a bit of work, if the mix seems a little dry don't worry, it does come together, have a bit of patience and you should end up with nice log shapes.
4. When you have the logs rolled, wrap them in clingfilm or baking paper. If you're going to freeze any, now is the time to pop them in. If you want to use them soon, then leave it in the fridge for a while until the butter hardens up again and you can cut neat slices, I usually cut them about 2cm slices. Place them on a baking tray on paper. Then bake at 180C for 9-12 minutes, check them regularly after 9 minutes. Allow them cool slightly before removing them from the tray.



The cocoa powder I used wasn't the best quality so they normally come out quite a bit darker. I'd say the cookies would also work well with some nuts or maybe white chocolate chips added to the mixture, if you're doing this I would use maximum 300g of whatever you decide.