'Butter and Brioche' blogger Thalia Ho makes the Rose Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies from her forthcoming debut cookbook, 'Wild Sweetness.'
On Play Me a Recipe, your favorite cooks will walk you through their most treasured recipes, offering all the insider tips, stories, and tricks you won't get from a written recipe—and you'll be right alongside them, every step of the way. Feel free to pause, jump back, or navigate the steps via the podcast chapters.
If you're cooking along, here's the recipe we're making today. Go ahead and grab the ingredients below (Thalia starts listing them at 2:49) before starting the episode.
Rose Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies
makes sixteen to twenty cookies
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Excerpted from WILD SWEETNESS by Thalia Ho. Copyright © 2021 by Thalia Ho. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Design, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Lobby Time Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Thalia Ho: The only thing left to do now is just to taste these. Which is, of course, the best bit.
Thalia: Hi, everyone. My name is Thalia, and I'm the creator of the blog Butter and Brioche, and today we're going to be making rose walnut chocolate chip cookies from my new cookbook--my first cookbook, actually--Wild Sweetness: Recipes Inspired By Nature. If you don't have the recipe, it's linked in the show notes below, or you can find it on Food52's website.
And yeah, it's in my cookbook, in the second chapter, which is called Flora. So my book mirrors the seasons, and so flora--we start early in the year. It's a spring chapter. It's very soft but strong, like flowers. Delicate, feminine, ephemeral, flushed. I'm not really sure if that's a word, but we're going to go with it. And it was probably the hardest chapter for me to write. I really left it--well, I did leave it to the last minute, which is funny because it's at the start of the book. Kind of worked backwards on that. I think because so much of my work has to do with flowers and flowering, that putting it onto paper, I don't know. It just wouldn't come out. I remember getting home from Paris, and a few days later I received word that I had to fly out to Italy to do a photo shoot, and I really was not too excited about it, you know, kind of--I had a book to write and all these obligations, and that was my priority. The last thing I needed was to do another red eye flight and just look like a mess. But I did it and I kind of took it as a sign, because Florence is the home of the Renaissance, and it's creative, and it's warm and artistic and feminine and floral again. And I kind of took it as a sign that that's what I needed to write this chapter. Yeah, so I'm very happy to be sharing this with you and to be making it alongside with you, too. It's summer in my kitchen, and so hot, and I have all the windows closed, but we're gonna try. We're going to turn on the oven and we're gonna try.
Thalia: So the first thing that we're going to do is just gather our ingredients. I'm gonna talk you through what you'll need and why as well. So yeah. So the first thing that you're gonna need is all purpose flour, and you'll need two and a quarter cups of that, or 280g if you're weighing it with the scale. Next up, we have our leavenings, so one teaspoon of baking powder and half a teaspoon of baking soda and half a teaspoon of salt, which refers to iodized table salt. I understand that a lot of people use kosher salt or have kosher salt, and that's fine. You can use that too. I don't use it. It's not available in my country. So, um yeah, either or will work. The next thing that we're gonna want to grab is unsalted butter. So two thirds of a cup, or one and a quarter sticks plus one teaspoon, 150g if you're weighing it on a scale. And preferably, we're gonna have that cubed up and set aside, ready to melt down. Next thing that we're going to need, our sugar is very important, of course. We need sweetness. So three quarters of a cup plus one teaspoon, or 170g light brown sugar. A lot of people ask me if they can replace light brown sugar with dark brown sugar. You know, sometimes you have one, you don't have the other, and honestly, that's fine. Like, obviously, I recommend just sticking to what the recipe says. But if you're desperate for it, then dark brown sugar is fine. Obviously, it contains like, a lot more molasses, so you'll probably end up with the cookie that's a little bit more hydrated, a little bit darker and intense in its flavor and color, so. And 100g of granulated sugar, or half a cup. Again, nothing excitable, very standard.
The next thing that we're gonna need is one large egg that should weigh about 70g, and one tablespoon of rose water. With the rosewater, I think I just want to mention that each brand varies in its strength. I've tried many brands over the years, and some are a lot lighter than others. Some are a lot heavier. It really depends on, I guess, what you have. I would suggest starting small if you're unsure and then building up to the full tablespoon. Next thing that we're going to need: vanilla extract, which is also a flower. I think a lot of people forget about that. It comes from an orchid, and we're going to need two teaspoons of that. The most important ingredient, I think, is the dark chocolate. So one cup of that, 170g, and it's listed as coarsely chopped. So the coarser you chop the chunks, the more kind of melty large puddles and pools you're going to get when it bakes. And walnuts, so half a cup of those, or 70g, and again, chopped, so you can do them coarsely, too. I think that's fine.
I've been asked before if you can leave out the walnuts, and yeah, you can do that too. I know with like, chocolate chip cookie purists, sometimes people don't really want walnuts in their cookies, and that's fine. You can--you can leave them out. It won't really affect the overall composition of the cookie too much. And our finishing ingredients: fleur de sel, which is like a finishing salt, it's coarse and more granular, and rose petals. So with these rose petals, they should be not the rose petals from your garden. They should be culinary grade, edible, that we sprinkle over once the cookies are baked. Looks very pretty. They should be very pink and pigmented too. A good tip that I only kind of learned about recently is to keep your rose petals in the refrigerator because, like every flower, they wither and fade so they will lose their color over time. So I think, you know, a good tip is just to keep them cold and stored and sealed, and it will retain their color for longer.
So I'm going to be making these at the same time as you. Everything that I need is already measured and laid out in front of me. So if you haven't done that already, I would suggest you do that too. In French, we call it mise en place, and it literally translates to everything in its place, or something like that. And it really just kind of allows for a smooth and seamless creation process. But I'm not going to harp on it. You do what you want. Um, so yeah, make sure--at least make sure everything is weighed up and ready to go.
Thalia: So first step is just whisking together the dry ingredients. So the flour, baking powder, soda, and salt. Nothing crazy. Just no fancy whisking action, no sifting. Just make sure that everything is well combined. The main point of it is to make sure that, really, our leavenings are well distributed in the dry ingredients. So our next step is just to melt down the butter until it's golden. Again, nothing too out of the ordinary on that. So the butter that we cubed up and measured earlier, put it into a saucepan now and transfer it to the stove and turn on. There we go. I have a gas stove. It can be very temperamental. Over medium-low heat. And really, what you want to do is just stand here with it and stir it until it's all melted down. I'm very guilty of this at times, like I'll just like, throw it on and walk away, and we don't want to leave it because we don't want it to, you know, foam up or sizzle or start to brown in any way.
Thalia: And...turning it off the heat. And so we're going to pour it into a bowl, a large mixing bowl. And then add in all our sugars that we had set up earlier. Whisking until smooth. Next thing, we're going to crack in an egg, and then we're gonna whisk it in to the point that it's smooth, or well-combined. And the mixture should start to look real, kind of like, glossy, and it'll kind of--you'll notice it'll develop a little bit of resistance against your whisk, which is a good indicator that that's how it should be. Perfect. So once that's done, all we have to do now is just splash in the rosewater that we had earlier, and our vanilla as well. So one tablespoon rosewater and two teaspoons of vanilla. Again, if you haven't really experimented much with rosewater before, or used the brand that you have, maybe start off a bit small and then see what it's like and adjust from there.
Thalia: So right now in front of you should have a very kind of fluid but glossy, sticky mixture. I'm ready to add in the dry ingredients that we whisked together earlier. Adding in our dry ingredients now into our wet ingredients, and then taking a wooden spoon and giving it a good mix together just until the point where it's almost incorporated. You kind of don't want it to be incorporated fully. You can kind of--still should be able to see some, like, floury pockets, and that's really what we want. And then once that's done, you can throw in the chocolate and the walnuts. Again, mixing just until the point that it's incorporated and those floury pockets that you should--that you saw earlier should have kind of disappeared by now.
So now that the dough is done, we're going to give it some time to rest in the refrigerator. About half an hour. You can stretch it out a little bit longer, but it does need time to rest. You know, it has to relax and develop flavor, and it also has to firm up, because if you can tell, it's quite a--quite a loose dough. We want to be able to scoop it and have it retain its shape. So just cover the bowl up, place it in the refrigerator and let it relax, and we'll be back in about half an hour and we can bake the cookies off.
Thalia: So we're back. It's been about an hour. I got a little bit distracted. It's getting on in the day, and where I live, we get the most beautiful sunsets. So I was taking photos of that, but um, my dough is right where I wanted to be right now. It has the perfect kind of density and texture for me to be able to scoop it out with ease, so I've just pulled the bowl out of the refrigerator and set it on the counter in front of me while I preheat the oven. So I'm going to do that now, and preheating it to 350° Fahrenheit, or 180° Celsius, depending on where you live. And my oven has already been configured from when I baked last time. So I have two oven racks inside, one centered about in the top third and one centered in the bottom third. And I'd recommend doing that now if you--if you want to. It just makes sure that, like, we get perfectly baked, even cookies, because we're gonna be baking off two sheets at a time and then rotating them as well.
Thalia: Also in front of me, I have two large baking sheets. I use, like, aluminum. I think that's how you say it. I can never say it properly. And then I've lined them with nonstick parchment paper, or baking paper. The next step that we're going to do is just to portion out our dough into balls, and for this I'm using a cookie scoop, and it's a piece of equipment that I use, like, a lot more than I thought I would in the kitchen. It's good for things, even like cupcake batter, scooping it into paper liners, not just for cookies. And it really is, like, the secret to getting the perfectly round cookie that you see on my Instagram. I really like it. And I think this is the medium size, and it produces about like a palm-sized cookie, which is, like, perfect. But if you don't have one, you can easily produce a really, really similar result just using a generous large tablespoon and then kind of like, rolling the dough between your hands as you go into into little balls. But this thing just makes it so much easier. And neater. So, I'm going to just take a little bit, scoop out a little bit of the dough, and scoop it onto my--like I have a marble slab in front of me. And then I'm going to go through, and I'm going to do it for each one.
(musical interlude)
Thalia: So depending on how generous you are with your scooping, you should have about 16 to 20 dough balls in front of you. I think I've got--yeah, I've got 16. I kind of go a little bit heavy handed, especially towards like, the end. I start off like, pretty conservative, and then just, like, gets more and more generous as I go along. Or I get lazier, I'm not sure. And so what we're going to do now is just transfer them onto the sheets that we set out earlier, and I like to fit about eight cookies per sheet. I think that's like the perfect amount of space, because you need to make sure that they've got space so that they can spread during baking. I've got enough for two trays. If you have a few more leftover that don't really fit, you can just put them to the side or keep them in the refrigerator, or even store them in the freezer to be baked off later, and you can bake them from frozen too just fine.
So now that we have our cookies on our sheets, the last thing to do is just to sprinkle over some finishing salt before we bake them. I have in front of me some fleur de sel, and it's probably my favorite of all the finishing salts. I like how it is very refined and tiny, and it has a really strong taste, like the sea. But you can use flaked salt, that's a classic. And I think pink Himalayan flaked salt actually would be really pretty against these. Um, so yeah, sprinkling over a very light pinch over the tops of each. Not getting too crazy with it. We kind of want our fingers to look like they're doing ballet, and not about to throw a punch. A styling tip that I use often is sometimes I will hold off on the salt until after the cookies are baked, because that way I can kind of control dispersion and the way the viewer's eye is going to go at these cookies in my photograph. And I like to use a little bit of symmetry, so. So now that we've done that, I'm going to transfer them into the oven and bake them off for 10 to 12 minutes, not that long. Warm cookies in not long at all.
(musical interlude)
Thalia: So the cookies have been in the oven now for about six minutes. I'm just going to take the first sheet out and give it a light kind of tap on the surface here and then put it back into the oven, rotating it around and then doing the same with the other sheet.
So while the cookies finish baking, I thought we could have a little discussion on chocolate pools and pan banging. I get asked those questions a lot, especially if I pan bang, and the answer to that is sometimes. If you don't know what it is, it's a technique popularized by the very lovely Sarah Kieffer from the Vanilla Bean baking blog. And essentially what you do is, just towards the end of baking, you take the sheet out and tap it against, like, a kitchen surface, kitchen bench. Put it back in the oven, let the cookies like, rise up again. The point is to deflate the cookie and to get the chocolate to spread, and it is very, very helpful for doing that. And it creates like a very beautiful, aesthetic-looking cookie. I just didn't write about it in in this book. With this recipe it wasn't necessary, and especially if you cut your chocolate chunks large enough, they will spread, and that's why I kind of take the sheet out, and I just give it, like, a light tap when I'm rotating them halfway through baking.
Um, but yeah. Especially--(sound of timer going off) Ooh! So the cookies are done. Going to take them out now before I get back to what I was saying. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. So especially in summer, as I am right now, like I'm in a really hot kitchen, the last thing I want to be doing is opening and closing like an oven door that is just blasting 180° heat out at me. So you can totally do it with this recipe, and it will work and create something really, really stunning. And that's totally fine. And you can also not do it at all either, and you'll still get something really delicious. So now that the cookies are done, we're just going to let them cool on their sheet for about a couple of minutes, maybe two minutes, before transferring them off and onto a wire rack to cool completely before we finish them off.
So I am just moving my cookies off and onto the wire rack. They're pretty--they're still warm but able to be handled. We don't want them to, like, overcook on the sheets. It's actually important to get them off within the first few minutes.
What you should be looking at in front of you is a cookie that is crisp around the edges and golden brown, but a little bit soft and gooey and puffed in the middle, which is generally how I how I like to have my cookies. Kind of a mix between like, thin and crispy but also cakey in a way, it has a little bit of like, body to it. I think what I'm gonna do now is just while these are finishing cooling, because I like to photograph them while they're still warm and the chocolate is melted, I'm gonna go ahead and put my little rose petals on the top now. Just sprinkling them over and kind of distributing them very randomly. And this step is entirely optional. You don't have to do it. It doesn't really--it makes it like a little bit more thematic, and you can eat the rose petals and you'll get more like a rosy...but also peppery bite to them. But it's totally up to you if you choose to do it or not.
Thalia: The only thing left to do now is just to taste these, which is, of course, the best bit. Cookies are always better when they're warm just out of the oven. I do find, though, that the rose flavor of these develops as they cool. So if you try one now and try one later, it'll probably be more pronounced later. It's very mellow as it is right now. Try one, tell me what you think and take photos too. I love to see my recipes and how everyone interprets them. And if you have any questions, feel free to send them my way. I try to get back and respond as much as I can. Or you can also direct any questions onto the Food52 recipe. And so, yeah, I really enjoyed talking you all through this process, and thank you for being here with me and taking time out of your day. And I hope you enjoy the cookies, and I really hope you enjoy the book. And I would love, always love to hear your thoughts.