German Chocolate Cookies are gooey dark chocolate, sweet toasted coconut and pecans. ‘Nuf said.
While I may enjoy a good piece of layer cake, it doesn’t make much sense to make one for only two people. And most cakes that I like have a buttercream frosting or a chocolate ganache and require refrigeration. This is TOTALLY unrealistic for me. Unlike TV cooking personalities, I don’t have an empty spare refrigerator only filled with the ingredients for a single dish. I live in the real world.
So when my husband and I are craving a delicious German Chocolate Cake, I will turn to these German Chocolate Cookies instead. I came across this recipe in the New York Times. Interesting piece of cooking trivia – German Chocolate Cake isn’t German at all. It’s named after an American chocolate maker, Samuel German. Okay, German Chocolate Cookies aren’t an exact substitute for the cake, but they are awfully satisfying. And with cookies, there is never any waste.
If I am making something sweet, I like to balance it out with either a tart citrus or a darker chocolate. You could buy a 64% to 70% chocolate and chop it up yourself or you could take the lazy way out like I did and simply use a dark chocolate chip. Once you could only buy semi-sweet chips, but now you can easily find milk chocolate, sugar-free chocolate, flavored chocolate and dark chocolate.
And while you can easily toast your own coconut, I bought already toasted, sweetened coconut from Nuts.com, my go-to store for nuts, dried fruits and all kinds of wonderful ingredients and hard-to-find items. If you want to cut the sweetness even further, swap out unsweetened coconut for the sweetened coconut.
I have never outgrown my love of milk – real dairy milk. To me, NOTHING beats cookies and milk. So you can have yours with coffee, tea or dessert wine, but I’ll be enjoying my German Chocolate Cookies with a cold glass of milk!
These cookies would make a lovely gift over the holidays, packaged in a nice tin.
For other great cookie treats to fill that tin:
Vegan Italian Chocolate Cookies
Lavender Mint Shortbread Cookies
Vegan Oatmeal Raisin Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ma’Amoul – Moroccan Stuffed Tartlets
Recipe
Yield: About 30 cookies
Ingredients
1 cup/128 grams all-purpose flour
½ cup/47 grams Dutch-process cocoa powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
8 tablespoons/113 grams unsalted butter (1 stick), at room temperature
½ cup/101 grams granulated sugar
½ cup/110 grams packed dark brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 ½ cups/128 grams lightly toasted, sweetened shredded coconut
1 cup/170 grams chopped bittersweet chocolate (or chocolate chips)
1 cup/119 grams chopped pecans
Directions
Step 1
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour,
cocoa powder, baking soda and salt. In a large bowl, beat butter,
granulated sugar and brown sugar together with an electric mixer on
medium speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Beat in the egg and vanilla
until smooth.
Step 2
Reduce the speed to low and beat in the flour mixture. Add coconut,
chocolate and pecans and mix to just combine.
Step 3
Portion the dough in 2 tablespoon scoops and roll them into balls.
Place them on parchment-lined baking sheets, at least 2 inches apart.
Bake the cookies until dry on top but still soft in the center, about 10
minutes, turning once unless you have a convection oven. The cookies will not have spread much, so just go by how the surface looks. Remove from the oven and immediately tap the sheets against a work surface to deflate them slightly. Alternatively you could use a flat spatula to lightly press down on the cookies to flatten some. Allow the cookies to sit on the sheets for 3 minutes, then transfer them to a rack to cool completely.
