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German Chocolate Cookies
2 eggs 1 cup brown sugar 2 bars German chocolate 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon salt Grated rind 1/2 lemon 1 1/3 cups almonds, blanched and chopped 1 cup flour 1 teaspoon baking powder Beat eggs until light, add sugar, gradually, and continue the beating; then add chocolate, grated, and remaining ingredients. Drop from tip of spoon on a buttered sheet, and bake in a moderate oven.
A stiff drop cookie built on beaten eggs rather than butter, closer to a German nut lebkuchen than to an American chocolate chip cookie. The chocolate is grated in dry, not melted, and that matters to the texture.
- "German chocolate" is sweet chocolate, not a cake flavourThe name refers to German's Sweet Chocolate, a mild sweetened dark bar, and not to the coconut-pecan layer cake that later borrowed the name. Any sweet dark chocolate of around 45 to 50 percent cacao stands in well.
- Two bars is an ambiguous quantityThe book does not say what size bar it means. Roughly 4 to 6 oz of chocolate suits this amount of flour and egg.
- Grate it cold, do not melt itGrated chocolate stays in fine flecks through the batter and keeps the crumb dry and short. Melting it turns the dough slack and gives a quite different, brownie-like cookie.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is usually taken as about 350 to 375F. Drop cookies of this size take roughly 10 to 12 minutes; they should be set at the edges and still slightly soft in the centre when they come out.
- Beating the eggs is the leaveningBeat the eggs and sugar until pale and thick enough to fall in a ribbon, which takes several minutes with a mixer, then add the dry ingredients gently. The teaspoon of baking powder does its share of the lifting as well.
- AlmondsBlanched means skins slipped off after a minute in boiling water. Chop them by hand to a coarse, uneven crumb; a food processor will reduce them to paste and oil the dough.
- Buttered sheetParchment is easier and safer here, since the high sugar and nut content makes these prone to sticking and to scorching on the underside.
- YieldAbout three dozen small cookies from teaspoon-sized drops. They firm up considerably on cooling and keep well in a tin for a week.