TWD: Cocoa Volcano Cookies

Tuesdays with Dorie this week is hosted by MacDuff at Lonely Sidecar who chose the Cafe Volcano Cookies. As you can tell by the title, I made a substitute right off the bat with the recipe and used cocoa powder (2 Tablespoons Dutch processed) in place of the espresso in the cookies.

Dorie's description, which I haven't got in front of me while I type this, is something to the effect of shiny, puffed, craggy, crunchy cookies. I definitely hit on all those textures here so I would have to say I consider these a success. I do think that my cookies were slightly over baked though at the 20 minute mark, but that is an issue with my oven and not the recipe. Next time I will probably just take the cookies out of the oven sooner and hope they end up with a little more chew than super crunch.

I do have to say however that my boys loved these cookies (I did too, but my boys were really into these). I liked that they were easy to toss together and didn't take a lot of time or ingredients. I also liked the mixture of nuts and actually added in a few pecans as well because I didn't have enough walnuts.

The only other change to this recipe I made was just to give myself a little bit of insurance with the egg whites. I whisked them slightly in the pan before adding anything else, adding about 1/4 teaspoon of cream of tartar to help stabilize them. I did this for two reasons - my egg whites were several days old and had been hanging out in the refrigerator and it has also been snowing here quite a bit, which usually means that anything I try with egg whites is doomed to failure. Since the texture of my cookies turned out perfectly (other than the over baking) I don't regret taking out that bit of insurance.

I've got a feeling from the P&Q on the Tuesdays with Dorie blog that there will be many fun versions of these cookies around today, so be sure to check the blogroll and see what the other bakers have come up with.