Supersize Me! Is This What They Mean?

In another one of those tricks of coincidence, someone mentioned a bakery in my neighborhood and a couple of hours and a few errands later I found myself just across the street from it. 

The breads looked really good, but what I bought was what I had heard touted, a chocolate chocolate-chip cookie.  At $3.50, I thought it was expensive (although no one should listen to me on the price of storebought sweets because I almost never buy them).  I also thought it was big. Really big. Actually so big that the first thing I did when I got home was pop it on the scale.

This cookie weighed in at a whopping 6 ounces!  That's more than one-third of a pound.  In metric, that's 170 grams.  It was a monster!  Does anyone out there remember when McDonald's introduced the Quarter-Pounder and people thought that was sooooooo much meat? 

Just so you know, one Thin Mints Girl Scout Cookie (the only storebought cookies I had around) weighs a fraction over 1/4 ounce (or 8 grams) and the recommended serving size is four cookies, or 1 ounce, 1/6 of my chocolate whopper.

I not only didn't eat the whole cookie, I didn't even eat more than a teensy nibble, a rarity (if not a first) for me.  My beef with the cookie was its texture - essentially unbaked.  Sometimes, like with brownies, a slightly underbaked center can be a draw, but here, the innards just tasted of too much sugar and still-raw flour.

The raw insides set me to thinking about how they could have been anything but.  The cookie was so big - I think it must have been made with almost a cup of dough - it would have been a tough trick to bake the insides properly without overbaking the outside and the edges (not that there was much in the way of edges; this was really a mound).  And it would have been an equally tough trick to keep the whole thing from becoming more like a cake than a cookie.

I left the cookie on the kitchen counter, but the poor thing drew no takers - a shame, because had it been good, it would have been enough to make three or four cookie monsters happy. 

Comments

[Dorie]

Robyn, you make a really good case for underdone cookies, but ...

I really don't know why the underdoneness bothered me so much, given that I'm perfectly happy with molten chocolate cakes and gooey brownies.

With so much support for the big cookie, I think I should go back, re-try and re-think. When I get back to New York, I'll give the chubby sweets another go.

[Robyn]

Oh no, this is one of my most favorite cookies in the world! But you have valid reasons for not liking it, the same reasons that I do like it. :) You could almost eat it with a spoon, it's so soft. The first time I tried the cookie I ate an entire one in one day, at the end of which I felt a bit deathly, so...yes, the size is a bit of a problem for people like me who don't have much willpower. Otherwise the cookie keeps well, perhaps because of all that sugar and fat and stuff.

Not that you would be itching to try another cookie after the ill fated chocolate chocolate chip cookie, but my favorite flavor is the chocolate chip walnut cookie. (Yup, I tried all the flavors! I have the extra layer of fat to prove it.) I also like their scones, which are normal sized. ;)

[Maria]

Wow, that is one big cookie! Sorry it wasn't worth it. I usually don't buy sweets either, cookies are always best out of your own oven, especially if you are using a Dorie recipe:)

[Kelly-Jane]

I thought it was a muffin too, then I thought it was packed dark brown suger - but a 6oz cookie!! - would rather have 2 or even 3 small ones than one monster.

In my opinion only brownies and the odd chocolate cake are ok underdone, but the world is full of many different tasters :)

KJxx

[Dorie]

First off, apologies because I'm not going to say where I got the cookie -- but I love that there are Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys who are so crazy about cookies that they can sleuth them out.

After I posted this -- and even before I got these comments and some personal emails as well -- I realized that I was taking a very one-sided view of the cookie world: the crunchy side. And Phoebe's comment really brought that home to me again.

Phoebe, it's not a sacrilege to professionals or anyone else to like soft, cookie-dough cookies. Nor is it wrong to like super-big cookies. They're just another style of cookie and thank goodness there are enough different kinds of cookies to make us all happy.

Reading Phoebe's remark about her favorite cookie being like "dough with melted chips" reminded me of how popular cookie-dough ice cream is. Again, not a favorite of mine.

I always knew the world was divided into fudgy brownie-lovers and cakey brownie-lovers, now I know there are well-baked cookie-lovers and under-baked cookie-lovers, too.

Robyn, it's so great that you reverse engineered the cookie you love from Ghiradelli. I'll have to try it the next time I'm in San Francisco.

Lisa, funny comment about the muffin. It's what my husband thought it was when he saw the real thing. In fact, he thought I'd eaten the muffin and left him the top!

[Phoebe Damrosch]

I feel like a cookie Nancy Drew - it also looks and sounds like Levain to me! But I love Levain and I love the fact that their monster cookie-scones are cooked rare. It's like dough with melted chips, but I'm sure it's sacrilege to a professional.

Great site, Dorie!

[nysee]

looks like levain!

[Lisa]

Ha! I was shocked to read that it was a cookie - I thought it was one of those extra large chocolate muffins!

I'm all for big when it comes to chocolate, but I think a cookie that size, even thoroughly baked through, would be way too much - by the time you got through the whole thing it'd be stale.

xoxo

[Robyn]

My goodness. What a disappointment to end up with a bad cookie given there are so many other delectable little guys out there. I always wonder why our super-sized country decided the bigger the better. My personal heavyweight winner is out here in San Francisco--the chocolate chip cookies sold from Ghirardelli . It is easily a treat for four. This cookie, however, is so good it gives me reason to run in their stores just to grab one--I have even reverse-engineered the recipe. I'm glad you didn't eat your chocolate monster. . .nothing worse than wasting treat-time on something merely adequate--or worse!