Deliciousness served in small batches: Double Chocolate Rye Cookies

Rye flour adds a nice nuttiness to these luscious chocolate cookies. The small batch recipe helps avoid overindulging. Recipe below.

I AM GIVEN TO RANTING ABOUT HOW I DISLIKE BAKING COOKIES. So much fussing, so much stickiness, so many sheets and sheets of blobs of dough and so much anxious peering into hot, hot ovens—by the time everything is done and cooling on masses of racks, I am beyond done. I don’t even want to eat them.

And then the other day, when I was thinking “we’ve got all this rye flour, can you make sweets with that?” the tiny, vague light bulb way in the back of the skull switched on. Small batch cookies. Small batch cookies. Duh.

This very nice small-batch recipe comes from Cloudy Kitchen, whose motto is “delicious and dependable baking” and whose owner, Erin Clarkson, lives in New Zealand. Erin’s passion is highly accurate, repeatable recipes, broken down into clear, manageable steps. We admire her work enormously! And I was not surprised to find that yes, she had an idea for a rye-flour cookie, and it is a genius one.

This recipe for double chocolate rye cookies comes together easily. Like all of Erin’s recipes, its components are measured by weight, not volume, for a more accurate result. So make sure you have a kitchen scale on hand.

The rye flour brings a delicate nuttiness—these cookies won’t taste like deli bread. (If you don’t have rye flour on hand, you can use all regular flour.) The olive oil vanishes into the luscious whole. At the end, you have a modest number of cookies with a rich, deep, uncompromisingly chocolate flavor—very luscious and very satisfying. These are not just nice—they are marvels. And because this is small batch baking, you aren’t tethered to the hot stove for hours, and you won’t have dozens of cookies hanging around your kitchen afterward.

This recipe makes just about a dozen three-inch cookies, the right amount for a small family or a nice little party or to treat yourself for. (see Kitchen Notes) And yes, you can multiply the recipe if dozens of cookies are what you need.

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Double Chocolate Rye Cookies

Rye flour adds a nice nuttiness to these luscious chocolate cookies.

Servings 11 or 12 cookies

Ingredients

• 75g extra virgin olive oil (we used Kirkland 100% Italian from Costco)
• 100g dark brown sugar
• 50g white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 30g cocoa powder, sifted
• 75g unbleached white flour, sifted
• 45g rye flour, sifted (you can use all unbleached white flour)
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 150g bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped, plus extra for topping if desired

Instructions

• Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. Heat the oven to 325ºF. You will be using two shelves.
• Put the olive oil, brown and white sugars and the egg into a medium bowl and beat on high with an electric mixer for one minute.
• Sift the cocoa and flours into the bowl, then add in the vanilla, salt and baking powder, and stir together by hand using a wooden spoon. The batter will be very stiff and stubborn—keep going until everything is well mixed. Then add in the chopped chocolate and stir together until everything is evenly mixed.
• To make the balls of cookie dough, measure out 3 tablespoons of the dough and roll into an approximate ball. Place on a cookie sheet and flatten very slightly. If you like, press in one or two extra chunks of chocolate into the center top. I used chunks that had fallen out of the dough during the ball-rolling process. This recipe should make about a dozen three-inch cookies (see Kitchen Notes).
• Put both cookie sheets in the hot oven, one on each shelf, and set a timer for 8 minutes. When it sounds, switch the cookie sheets, and set the timer for another 8 minutes.
• The cookies are ready when the outer edges start to set—if you lightly press the edges, they will feel a bit stiff, but will slightly give away. Take the sheets out of the oven and set them on the stovetop or on racks on the counter—let them cool on the sheets, not on racks, for 15 or 20 minutes before trying to pick them up.

Kitchen Notes

Alternate sizing. You make also make larger cookies—to make 8 (or so) 4-inch cookies, measure out 1/4 cup balls of dough and bake two or three minutes more.

An extra finish. Before putting them in the oven, you can top with a pinch of coarse or flaky sea salt.

Scoot! I am apparently the last baker in the universe to know about cookie scooting—which is to make your freshly baked but blobby cookies pretty and symmetrical by inverting a coffee mug or a jar or a cookie cutter with a slightly bigger circumference over the still-hot cookie and quickly scooting it around on the baking sheet until it becomes nicely round. As you see, I, um, didn’t do that for these. But this is a thing, which you can do.

Leftover cookies? Any cookies that go uneaten that day can be stored in an airtight container. Try to eat them in a day or two—trust us, it won’t be a hardship.

Looking for more baking ideas? Check out Erin's excellent blog Cloudy Kitchen.

Liz’s Crockery Corner. This lovely plate from the 1840s has been featured on Blue Kitchen before. You can get its fascinating back story here.