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Caramel Crunch–Chocolate Chunklet Cookies

Image may contain Food Dessert Confectionery Sweets Bread and Muffin
Photo by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Cyd McDowell, Prop Styling by Paige Hicks

These not-your-average chocolate chunk cookies boast big caramel flavor—but there’s no caramel in the ingredient list. Instead, the sugar and butter in these slice-and-bake one-bowl cookies brown in the oven for a deeply sweet, nutty, caramelly flavor, and the cookies are baked in muffin tins for extra toasty, crisp edges. If walnuts aren’t your thing, feel free to substitute with more chopped chocolate. From Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, out now.

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What you’ll need

Ingredients

Makes 24

½

cup (100 g) granulated sugar

½

cup (55 g) powdered sugar

1

tsp. Diamond Crystal or ½ tsp. Morton kosher salt

1

cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into pieces, room temperature, plus more for pans

1

tsp. vanilla extract

cups (281 g) all-purpose flour

3

oz. bittersweet, semisweet, or milk chocolate, coarsely chopped

½

cup coarsely chopped walnuts

Preparation

  1. Step 1

    Using an electric mixer on medium speed, beat granulated sugar, powdered sugar, salt, and 1 cup butter in a large bowl until creamy, about 2 minutes. Beat in vanilla; scrape down sides of bowl. Add flour and pulse mixer a few times, then beat on low speed until flour is almost fully incorporated, about 1 minute (don’t overbeat; dough should be more clumpy than smooth). Beat in chocolate and walnuts just to blend.

    Step 2

    Turn dough out onto a surface and knead gently to bring together. Divide in half and form into 6"-long logs about 2" in diameter (no need to be perfect about shape of logs). Wrap in plastic and chill until firm, at least 2 hours.

    Step 3

    Place racks in upper and lower thirds of oven; preheat to 350°. Butter 2 standard 12-cup muffin pans. Unwrap logs and mark at ½" intervals, then cut into rounds with a chef’s knife. Place rounds in muffin cups.

    Step 4

    Bake cookies, rotating pans top to bottom and front to back halfway through, until golden on top, browned around the edges, and slightly soft in the center (cookies will firm up as they cool), 20–22 minutes. Let cool in pans 3 minutes, then transfer cookies to wire racks and let cool completely.

    Do Ahead: Dough can be formed into logs 3 days ahead; keep chilled, or freeze up to 2 months. Thaw 1 hour at room temperature or overnight in the refrigerator before slicing and baking. Cookies can be baked 7 days ahead; store airtight at room temperature.

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Excerpted from ‘Baking With Dorie: Sweet, Salty, & Simple’ 2021 by Dorie Greenspan. Reproduced by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

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How would you rate Caramel Crunch–Chocolate Chunklet Cookies?

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  • These are neither caramel, crunchy nor cookies. This is shortbread and turns out about how you’d expect: dry, which is ok for shortbread, but the kneading and buttering of a muffin tin is just not worth the effort here. Throw some chocolate chips in your go-to recipe for shortbread cookies and you’ll have a better result.

    • Kevin R

    • Atlanta

    • 5/24/2023

  • I think it's the pic that's most confusing because it looks soft chewy and brown. There not bad and the powered sugar makes a crunchy caramel inside the cookie but i would have not put it on my Christmas desert table next to chocolate-almond praline cookies they were to similar and not as good

    • Merritt

    • Maui

    • 12/25/2022

  • Made these cookies as extras when we had a house full of people for Thanksgiving and lots of other goodies. Went in the next morning to have one with my coffee and they were all gone. They were clearly a big hit. I would definitely recommend using good butter and high quality chocolate as there are so few ingredients.

    • Anonymous

    • White Stone, Virginia

    • 12/15/2022

  • Making these and I refuse to omit the egg. An egg is clearly missing.

    • The egg man

    • 12/14/2022

  • Completely bemused by this recipe, as I see are many [not all] below. It all went fine, looked golden brown when taken out of the oven, but they were like burnt rusks to eat. No softness at all. I see some describe it as shortbread... not that the recipe does, it calls them cookies. It still made overcooked shortbread. Not sure what they'd have been like if cooked for half the time? However I think this batch is for the bin & I won't try again!

    • Lisa H

    • London, England

    • 8/11/2022

  • The first Dories Greenspan recipe that did not meet my expectations. Where is the caramel? The dough was too dry to hold together so I added some water to the first batch. The result was crumbly and nothing special about the taste. So, I added an egg to the rest of the dough. No improvement. They are shortbread like but I wanted caramel cookies.

    • mbw

    • San Diego

    • 6/11/2022

  • These are excellent cookies. I use plenty of butter in the muffin tins and get great results. They do not have the texture of a typical chocolate chip cookie because they are shortbread cookies. I’ve made them multiple times and everyone who has tried them loves them.

    • Jeff in VA

    • Virginia

    • 6/5/2022

  • The picture featured above must be from a different recipe. This is a shortbread recipe and in practice clearly does not provide the crisp brown edge photoshopped onto the cookies next to the header.

    • Anonymous

    • 5/29/2022

  • I made some changes because I wanted a very crunchy almost carmanelized texture to these cookies and it came out exactly what I was hoping for. I used one half cup less flour because I didn’t want a texture like cake as I saw some of the reviews commented on. Also I skipped the powdered sugar and instead used one quarter cop brown sugar in its place. Second I mixed some softened butter with sugar and put a dollop of that on top of each Cooke in the tin. It did exactly what I was hoping for…delicious super crunchy cookies. This will replace chocolate chip cookies in our house.

    • Sue Z

    • Cape Town South Africa

    • 5/10/2022

  • Have never written a review before but completely perplexed by this recipe. It is nothing like the name, description or picture. Agree it’s more like a chocolate chip shortbread with decent flavour and the muffin tin didn’t do a thing. Very strange for a Bon Appétit recipe as I almost always have great success with them. Can you please supply a recipe that fits this cookie description BA? Thought it sounded delicious!

    • Very odd

    • Vancouver Canada

    • 4/4/2022

  • Delicious cookies. Have replaced chocolate chip cookies in my house. Far more elegant.

    • dmsnyc10

    • Maryland

    • 4/3/2022

  • Sugar. . . Sugar ... Sugar. Butter . . Butter . . . Butter. NO. . . NO. . . NO.

    • LL

    • Greenwich Village, NYC

    • 2/12/2022

  • As soon as I finished making these cookies, my family devoured a whole batch of them, so I would disagree with some of the negative reviews here. The dough is a little dry, but I found after kneading well it turned out fine. The title is definitely misleading, but the end result is still delicious- totally worth making again!

    • Anonymous

    • Sacramento, CA

    • 1/21/2022

  • I'm amazed at so many negative reviews - these were delicious with a shortbread flavor, but a bit more chew. I left out the walnuts and they were perfect. I hesitated to try these because I didn't like the look of the cookie in the photo, but mine didn't have that raised edge from the muffin tin - the cold, sliced rounds stayed sharp even through baking. And mind were much more lightly golden - I baked them 25 mins and they were just getting brown on the edges. I was nervous when I saw the crumbly dough, but it pulled together perfectly with just a bit of kneading in the bowl. These are my new favorite!

    • nonalu

    • Asheville, NC

    • 1/17/2022

  • So phenomenal that I now want to bake my next cookies (peanut butte, molasses, cookie butter & molten chocolate this way). Mine didn't quite caramelize as shown in the pics AND needed longer bake times, but wow, the flavor! Agreed, the choc chip ones tasted more like shortbread, but the heat from being directly on metal on bottom and eventually on sides as cookies expand give a great texture inside and out and flavor seems a little more intense possibly because of restricted spreading. A definite winner!

    • Glenn

    • Palm Springs

    • 11/22/2021