Tomorrow if you don’t know is Chocolate cake day. That’s right January 27, is the day to celebrate the fine decadence of chocolate cake. There really is no better reason to eat a chocolate cake, not that one really needs a reason.
Over the years I’ve made lots of chocolate cakes, but my favorite is my Williams-Sonoma Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate Cake. The secret ingredient in this cake, as the name implies, is of course Williams-Sonoma Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate mix.
Cake to Cookies
While I do love that cake, sometimes you don’t want a whole cake, just a quick cookie. I love cookies and I thought hey, why not convert my favorite chocolate cake into a cookie.
Now I didn’t want to just make mini cakes, I actually wanted to change the consistency of my rich moist cake to a chewy cookie.
Before attempting this I decided to do some research and well it’s hard. You type in cake to cookie recipe and you get the cake mix cookie recipe. That’s great and all, but I’m using a from scratch cake batter, not quite the same.
However I did come across a few helpful articles one of which was “The science of cookies vs cakes” on Food 52’s website. This community forum posted the question discussed the texture of cookie dough vs cake batter.
What I got from the comments from this post was that the amount of eggs and sugar have an affect on the mixture. After reviewing some cookie recipes and comparing them to cake recipes I found that cakes have typically more sugar and eggs.
From all this research I figured I had a halfway idea of what I was going to do. Basically I’d take my favorite cookie recipe, which happen to be my chocolate chip cookies, and rework it with my hot chocolate cake recipe. Using the egg and sugar count for the cookie recipe or close to that.
- 2 cup flour
- 1/4 cup cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cups sugar
- 2-eggs
- 1 cup Crisco® Vegetable Shortening
- 1/2 (8 oz) block cream cheese
- 3 oz milk chocolate, melted
- 1/2 cup dry hot chocolate mix
- 1 tablespoon vanilla
- 1.5 oz milk chocolate , melted
- caramel sauce
- marshmallows
- reheat oven to 350 degrees.
- In a blender mix sugar, cream cheese and shortening until creamy. Mix in eggs one at a time. Then add the vanilla.
- In a separate bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and cocoa powder.
- Slowly blend the dry ingredients with the wet. Once well blended add the melted chocolate and hot chocolate mix to the batter. Mix well.
- Refrigerate the dough for one hour before forming cookies. Form tablespoon size ball for each cookie. Place on parchment paper and bake for 8 to 10 minutes.
- Place marshmallows on cookies and bake for another minute, to melt marshmallow.
- *Optional: After cooling drizzle tops of cookies with melted chocolate and caramel sauce.
The Results?
After mixing the ingredients I was rather impressed, it looked like a cookie dough and not a cake batter. I let the dough set in the fridge over night, I find this makes an easier to work with dough and slightly better cookie.
For no apparent reason I decided to use my whoopie pie cake pan. I’d never used it and and thought that it would make a nice uniformed cookie. Instead it made it kind of puffy, more like a cake.
I later opted to just make them the regular way on parchment paper on a regular baking pan. These came out more cookie like.
However, despite the dough looking right and all, the cookies, were sadly a little dry. Maybe they needed more eggs. Maybe it was the chocolate? I just don’t know. They tasted good and once topped with the marshmallow, melted chocolate and caramel sauce, it was really good, but not quite moist as I’d hope.
Try It Yourself
I’d love for you guys to give this recipe a shot and see if there was any way to improve it or if you like it as is. I’d love to hear your opinions on the topic. In the meantime, go get yourself some chocolate cake for tomorrow.
Must not lick computer screen….
Wow, my taste buds are dancing at the mere though of these scrumptious wintertime treats. Thank you for sharing them with us, sweet lady!
♥ Jessica
I’m glad you like them Miss Jessica. They aren’t bad, but I like the cake version better, I’ve also used the Williams-Sonoma’s Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate mix in my chocolate fudge, it’s pretty good.