Chocolate Truffle Cookies are amazing! Yet, upon tasting my first one, I instinctively understood that these cookies, like an undomesticated man or a wild horse, would have to be broken before they could form a relationship with other ingredients.

Photo credit: Just Baked.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I was in the mood to bake cookies this weekend, and came across a great-looking recipe for Dahlia Bakery Chocolate Truffle Cookies on a food blog called Just Baked. The opening photo is re-pinned from that site, and if you click it (or click here), it’ll take you to the recipe.

I introduced these cookies to some ice cream. It was love at first sight.  This post is the story of their deep, dark, chocolate-vanilla romance.

These cookies are insanely chocolaty. Seriously. I took a bite of one while it was still warm, and it was like time stood still and my entire experience of life was nothing but dark chocolaty richness. I’m not sure if I instinctively closed my eyes, or if I blacked out. I was overwhelmed by the cookie’s “chocolatiness” or “chocolateness,” but neither word is in the dictionary, which I cannot understand, since the concept is pretty straightforward as an extension of “chocolaty.” Fortunately, that grammatical conundrum snapped me back to my senses, or I still might be stuck there, knowing nothing but thick and intensely flavorful chocolate. More importantly, I would not’ve gotten to the second bite!

A couple notes on baking these cookies:

• I generally have a metric tonne of chocolate in my pantry. Yet this recipe required more bittersweet than I had on-hand. Don’t let that happen to you.
• In the course of following this recipe, I exhausted my small inventory of Silpats and decided to press on with a Wilton non-stick, insulated cookie sheet, which, I was pleased to find, worked perfectly on its own. This begs for the question, do you really need to own a Silpat? I’m going to say yes, for the same reason that you cannot ride a bike without incredibly expensive cycling clothing.
• Check out this bed head.  There are some guys who achieve this look simply by
  

  Bed Head (credit: About.com)

  rolling out of bed, while for others, it would require a team of stylists working with an unlimited supply of hair gel. Baking is like that. There are some recipes you can just steamroll right into the oven, while others are far more finicky. This cookie recipe is in the latter camp, to a degree. You need to make sure your ingredients are at room temperature and that your oven is fully preheated. It’d be worth your while to read a bit about softened butter. The temperature of my room varies greatly, since I tend toward going with the flow rather than controlling my environment with an iron fist. So, it may take merely a single episode of Drunk History to warm up my butter, or it may take as long as a trip to the gym.

• Although the recipe didn’t instruct me to beat the hell out of the butter and sugar, I did, out of habit. Or neglect. I mean, what’s the good of having a stand mixer, if you can’t walk away from it and take a phone call or something? “Hey, whassup? Nothing. Yeah, I’ve got the game on in the living room, but I’m actually baking cookies. Uh huh. My power drill? Yeah, you can borrow it.  But I need it back tonight, because Arnaud Dehaynin and the Cousins are coming over.  OK, later dude.” Next time I make these – and there will definitely be many “next times” – I’ll beat the butter and sugar just until they’re well-blended, taking no more than about 30 seconds on low-speed. That should help fight any tendency they might have to spread too much.
• This dough is so brownie-batter-like, that I’m tempted to bake it in an edge brownie pan. I got one for Christmas a few years ago. I kind of think these cookies are brownies posing as cookies, anyway.

These cookies beg – they literally slip out of the pan onto the floor, get on their knees, and beg – for ice cream. So I got the idea to set them up on a blind date with some Breyers Extra Creamy Vanilla. Love at first sight, one thing led to another, yadda yadda yadda, and this stellar dessert was born:

Truffle Cookies and Cream

This is love, in a bowl. Like the best kinds of love, it invites flexibility: I like the contrast between chocolate and vanilla, but feel free to use your favorite ice cream flavor as well as your favorite type of nut. Caramel sauce? Marshmallow sauce? Sounds like fun. Just make sure it doesn’t get so sticky that it becomes distracting. Keep in mind that this dessert is all about texture. You don’t want to have to fight your way through the ice cream to get to the cookie.

 

Instead, you want the ice cream to be soft enough so you can catch it right in the very act of melting into the cookie. The whipped cream is essential. It puts the consistency of the ice cream and cookie into perspective and completes the textural picture.

MAKES FOUR SERVINGS, ALTHOUGH YOU MIGHT FIND ONE SERVING, TWO SPOONS, SOFT LIGHTING, AND NO DISTRACTIONS FAR MORE DESIRABLE.

Gather together four serving vessels – small bowls or medium-sized dessert glasses, for instance. Into each bowl, roughly crumble 2 cookies. Remove about a tsp of the crumbled cookie from each bowl and set aside. (As an option, you can add espresso at this point, pouring one shot into each bowl, on top of the cookie.) Use an ice cream scoop to divide the ice cream among the bowls. Add ¼ to ⅓ cup whipped cream to each bowl. Distribute the nuts over each bowl. With your thumb and fingers, grind the reserved cookie into small crumbs and sprinkle over the top of each bowl. Add one or two maraschino cherries to each bowl, and drizzle some of the cherry juice over the top.

Curious about the comparative quality of brands of chocolate? Leave a comment!