Blue Ribbon
Cookie of the Year Award

"These make great ice-cream sandwiches!" – Dorie Greenspan, from Dorie's Cookies













We've tried a hundred cookie recipes over the years, always seeking that one great masterpiece that has that elusive quality of being both tasty and perfectly textured at the same time.  I finally found a cookie that met these standards, but it wasn't our own.  We found the great chocolate chip in the most unlikely of places -- up on the top ski chalet at Lutsen. As we were going through the cafeteria line for a snack and a decaf coffee, I noticed that the cookie jar at the checkout counter was steamed and
the cookies inside barely visible. I reached in and found that these large chocolate chip cookies must have just come out of the oven and delivered here into the jar.  These were large and were the kind that held a crispy edge but inside still virtually gooey, the perfect cookie and the kind that tempts the hungry lunchtime eater to skip the lunch and order enough of these to tide them over until dinner time, which might have happened.  Two days ago we tried a recipe out of the great Dorie's Cookies cookbook, written by Dorie Greenspan, a famous American French food expert who wrote the James Beard award winning Around my French Table.  The Snowy-Topped Brownie Drops are, as she

plainly states in one of her great little introductions to her recipes, "At heart, they're a brownie. In fact, the recipe is a variation of my Classic Brownie, which I've been making forever." There is always a key to every great recipe, especially the ones that end up, luckily, just like you want them.  For this recipe, it starts with a perfectly melted and stirred combination of 8 ounces of blocked semi-sweet chocolate and 5 tbsp. of butter melted in a double boiler. If this overcooks, as we have all experienced, the two ingredients begin to separate and the mixture will become runny and the cookies eventually won't form well.  To this chocolate, add sugar, vanilla, sea salt and only 3/4 cup of flour, and finally 2 more oz. of chipped chocolate. The texture is still quite soft at this point, but a second secret is to harden the batter by cooling it in the refrigerator for up to 3 hours or, as I did, put it in the freezer for 30 minutes.  Pull out the hardened batter and, with the help of a handled cookie scoop, pull out a full portion and drop it and roll into a small bowl of powdered sugar, the second main secret to the success of these cookies.  As the cookie bakes, it is the powdered sugar that forms a sort of sweet crust on the cookie, protecting it somehow from overcooking within.  After cooling for only around five minutes, these cookies are quite crisp on the outside, but nearly unfinished brownie in the center, the chocolate pieces still holding some texture, gooey, sweet, hard but soft.  A great test of this kind of perfect texture is two days later.  Does it harden throughout as it dries, or is the cookie still soft and moist?  Two days later here, and only two survive.  They must have passed all the tests.