Extra Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've had to do a lot of work with our selection of Challengers for this year's 6th competition. Finding a recipe that doesn't require me to go out and buy a lot of ingredients with money we don't make here on The Chocolate Cult feels tiring plus none of these homemade goodies can be given out to trick o'treaters where I live. I thought that perhaps I could do something with the chips of Pascha 100% Organic Dark Chocolate that might please adults.  I tried the final products out at our neighborhood picnic so I had a lot of feedback.

How to test something like this?  I see a bag of chocolate chips, I think chocolate chip cookies.  There is a recipe on the bag but it had a lot of ingredient I simply do not keep on hand.  I don't get paid by the companies who send us products and I don't charge you all money to read this blog so I decided to go with a very basic cookie recipe that I had ingredients of in my pantry.  Was that a wise choice?

Ingredients:
1.5 sticks of margarine
2/3 C light brown sugar
1/4 C Splenda white sugar
1/4 C egg substitute
2 tsp real vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking soda mixed into 1/4 C water
1/4 tsp cinnamon
2 C whole wheat flour
1 bag 100% Pascha Organic Dark Chocolate chips

Instructions:
 1) Preheat oven to 375°F and get out a flat cookie sheet; do not grease it, do not use parchment paper on it.

2) Beat together margarine and sugars until the very smooth and you cannot see pieces of any of the ingredients.

3) Add in vanilla, eggs, and water with baking soda.  Beat until you can see very tiny pieces of the margarine mixture floating throughout.

4) Blend in cinnamon and flour until batter is a bit sticky but one consistent color.

5) Mix in the chocolate.

6) Drop by tablespoons onto your cookie sheet, depending on the size  you could get 9-16 cookies per sheet.

7) Bake for 10 minutes.

8) Remove and let cool for 2 minutes.

9) Transfer each cookie to either a cooling rack or paper on your table/countertop.  I love to reuse paper bags from shopping for this like my mother always did.

10) Let cool at least an hour then serve on a plate.

Challenges I encountered while using these chips are as follows.

First the chips being 100% cacao.  This means that the cookie recipe I used wasn't really sweet enough to counter the chocolate. Someone would really need to love dark chocolate to like these cookies.  That is NOT the fault of Pascha but my fault.  However, several of my neighbors said they liked them though one was their limit in terms of darkness. I loved them, I'm crazy about really dark chocolate though, and I think with the cookie the over all cacao level tasted around 85-90%. Another difficulty with the purity of the chocolate was that it melted so much that I had to remove these quickly from the baking sheet so they didn't stick really badly.

Secondly the bag is a smaller amount of chips in terms of weight than let's say your big brand varieties.  I don't think this is much of a problem given how intense the chocolate is.  I didn't do a smaller recipe though in hindsight a larger recipe so that each cookie had fewer chips might have been a better choice in terms of intensity if you don't like dark chocolate.

I see now why the recipe on the Pascha 100% Organic Dark Chocolate chips ingredients like avocado, molasses, and a lot of spices -- to counter the bitterness of the chips.  If you have the ingredients on hand, try that recipe.  Otherwise I'd say use these chips as you would simply pieces of chocolate, melt them into a recipe for fudge, or cake, or something like that which has a lot of sweet or spicy flavors.

The chips themselves definitely earn Sacrament status because they are as pure a chocolate as you can get.  Their purity and their size make them melt very easily without the next to break up, cut up, or bust up a larger piece of unsweetened baking chocolate as you have probably done numerous times. Unless you are allergic to chocolate (so sad) these are allergen free though the recipe on the bag would cause problems for at least one reader and former Acolyte I know because of the spices.  Great job, Pascha!  We look forward to success with your other products in the future.