Salted Oreo Chunk Cookies

It’s Sunday in Boston, which means it’s snowing. I can’t complain really because at least instead of the foot of snow they were predicting it’s really been mostly rain and now it’s turning to a slushy snow. Either way, I’ve learned that I won’t be leaving my house on Sundays so I do my food shopping on Saturdays and spend Sundays baking and cooking for the week. I never ever get sick (I like to believe I will myself to just not get sick) but yesterday I finally gave in and admitted I had a wicked sinus cold and spent the day watching a Vanderpump Rules marathon and napping on and off. Which meant I was up really early today since I slept about 15 hours yesterday. Which also means I baked cookies a lot earlier in the day and am not writing this blog post late night.

I have big plans tonight anyway … ordering Tasty Burger with the girl upstairs and watching the Red Carpet while nomming on some turkey burger and fries. Perfect little Sunday.

One of my coworkers sent me a picture last weekend of an Oreo chocolate chip cookie that a friend of his made. I’m always up for a good cookie challenge, so I bought a box of Oreos yesterday and stuck them in the freezer. I looked up a few other Oreo cookie recipes online but didn’t find any that I really liked, so I decided to just adapt my regular salted chocolate chip cookie and see how it turned out. I’m pretty happy with the results but I’ll let my coworkers be the judge of that tomorrow.

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks of butter, softened
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 ounces frozen semi-sweet chocolate (optional)
• 1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chunks
• 16 Oreo cookies, frozen
• Coarse sea salt

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Cream together butter and sugars. Mix in vanilla and eggs until well incorporated. Separately, sift together the dry ingredients and incorporate into the wet mixture.

Step 2: This part is optional, but I think adds some nice flavor. I took 2 frozen Hershey’s bars and grated them very finely in my food processor. The idea came when my friend Sarah was telling me about a Nieman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe that has this step. She had tried grating room-temperature bars but it didn’t turn out as well as expected. So I had a theory that grating frozen bars would keep the chocolate from melting. Mix this into the batter. It made about 3/4 of a cup.

Step 3: Add in the 1 1/2 cups of chocolate chunks (or chips). Chop up about 16 Oreos into quarters and add into the batter. Mix on a low speed so that you don’t pulverize the Oreos. I like to use them frozen because I like to eat them frozen. That’s about as scientific as my reasoning gets.

Step 4: Chill the dough for at least a half hour to make it easier to scoop. Use a cookie scoop and scoop even-size balls of dough onto a parchment or sil-pat lined baking sheet. Top with a dash of coarse sea salt and bake at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown.

I admit, I couldn’t even resist waiting until one of these cooled and I ate one straight off of the baking sheet. Oh man are these good. I’m going to try that grated chocolate secret (not a secret anymore) in some other cookies and see how it works out. The chunks of Oreos are a delicious surprise in these cookies because they add a nice crunch to an otherwise soft cookie. I bough these little mini chalkboards for my housewarming party, but I think I’m going to start being less ghetto in my cookie photography and start using these for the final shot. I also have a confession to make. In pure laziness today, I only painted my thumb nail for the photo. Don’t worry, I later painted the rest of my nails while on Facetime with my parents where my dad said “hashtag” before at least 20 other things he said. #likeaboss is the new saying of the week. Happy Sunday.