When I made the Dorie’s Two-Bite One-Chip Cookies, I learned that not all cookies require leavening. However, that still left fat, sugar, and flour as other necessary ingredients in a cookie.
Of course, I knew at the time that flourless cookies exist. I stand by the statement because although they are cookies with flour, the qualifier “flourless” indicates that this makes them different from the typical definition. By analogy, the “burrito bowl” doesn’t prove that burritos don’t need to be wrapped in a tortilla: the distinction is built into the name.
And yet, I hadn’t made flourless cookies before. I did make meringues, but those are an even more narrow subtype of cookies. Thus, when I saw this recipe and had a table of chocolate lovers nearby, I knew I had to give it a shot.
The recipe does have a bunch of slightly atypical ingredients: egg whites, vanilla bean paste, powdered sugar, dutch process coca powder, 63% dark chocolate chips, and walnuts. We fortunately had the vanilla bean paste from the Better Nutters, but I’m sure vanilla extract would have worked fine, too.
A few weeks ago, I boasted that I had a foolproof method for separating egg whites by letting it pour through my fingers. This is my mea culpa: I broke an egg yolk and let it get into my whites. I honestly don’t remember at the moment if I started over or just moved forward with the bit of yolk in there.
Since I don’t think I needed purity for beating, I suspect I was lazy and just used it.
Everything else goes in after that. Again, I could have sifted the cocoa powder and powdered sugar, but I just dumped them in.
The dough came together quite quickly, and it was also very sticky. In fact, it got quite difficult to work with since my balloon whisk was more flexible than at the dough.
The dough was gooey in the cookie scoop as well. I would have preferred smoother dough balls, but I just went with it in the shape they came out in. I then rifled through my Costco bag of walnuts to find the most intact pieces to put on top.
After baking, they barely looked different. The outside was slightly less shiny, but I couldn’t even tell a difference in the texture until after they had fully cooled.
The recipe didn’t specify, so I baked both sheets at the same time (adding a minute) with no noticeable problem. The cookies also came off the pan quite easily. They melted and expanded just enough to smooth out and cover up the imperfections in scooping.
Overall, the cookies were a big hit. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, they are quite a bit like fudge. Without leavening, the baking doesn’t do much to alter the structure much either.
The only complaint was the existence of the walnut. Almost every just took the walnut off to eat it first, then enjoyed the rest of the cookie.
If you want cookies that are basically just candy, you can find the recipe on Bake from Scratch.