The art of supersizing your favorite treat
By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com
If you buy a cookie from a bakery, chances are you’re getting a cookie considerably bigger than you’d get from a supermarket box or even than you’d make at home.
For Kat Forkey, a pastry chef at The Bakeshop on Kelley Street in Manchester, even the “little” cookies are still pretty substantial.
“We [bake cookies] that are 5 to 6 inches across,” she said, “but we can make much bigger ones for cookie cakes. Those are a little bit thicker and we decorate them kind of like the old like Mrs. Fields cookies where you get them decorated with ‘Happy Birthday.’ They’re a good height, so they can be sliced like a cake. So if people don’t like cakes they can have cookie cakes.”
Forkey said the cookie cakes can be as wide as or wider than a traditional birthday cake.
Baking a cake-sized cookie
Kat Forkey advised against trying to bake extremely large cookies on a traditional sheet pan. She generally bakes them in a cake pan or in a spring-form pan.
“We don’t like our cookies thin here,” she said, “so [a cake pan makes them] nice and thick like a good 1 or 2 inches.” The other secret to baking a super-large cookie, she said, is giving it plenty of time to cool before removing it from the pan.
“Usually we try to let it cool overnight if we can. Because what really happens is the chocolate gets all gooey. You don’t want the frosting to melt on there because then it’s just a big hot mess.”
“We can do different sizes,” she said, “so for us, because a lot of our cakes are by the amount of people you want to feed, we can do them different sizes too, like a 6-inch, an 8-inch, a 10-inch or even bigger.”
Forkey said that, big or gigantic, her most popular cookies are the traditional ones.
“I would say chocolate chip or M&M cookies are the most popular,” she said. She only bakes — it’s tempting to say a handful, but even one big cookie is a handful — a modest number of cookies each day. Most customers buy one at a time, she said, and six to 12 of each variety are enough to sell in a day. By baking small batches, she said, she can rotate through her stock quickly and ensure each cookie is fresh when she sells it.
Brett Fleckner has a more stripped-down approach. He owns Bagel Alley in Nashua and focuses most of his energy on bagels.
“The cookies are a side thing that we do,” he said. “We make them big and that’s why they sell. The customers like them big. If they weren’t big, we wouldn’t sell as many.”
Fleckner only makes one kind of cookie. “We just do chocolate chip,” he said. “We used to do three kinds, but now we just do chocolate chip, nice and simple. We made it from scratch, with a traditional recipe, with shortening, brown sugar, and eggs.”
The dough for Bagel Alley cookies spreads out in the oven as the cookies bake. That’s on purpose, Fleckner said.
“They’re not real thick, because then they’d be either doughy or cakey. So I don’t want them to be thick. You want a little chew in the middle, and you don’t want it to fall apart.” Each cookie is 5 to 6 inches across, he said, and weighs about 7 ounces. He uses an ice cream scoop to measure the dough into 7-ounce portions. And, of course, they are thin, chewy in the center, and crispy on the edges.
Lighthouse Local in Bedford follows a different path. While not as wide as some other big cookies — maybe 4 inches or so across — theirs are about an inch thick. Trina Bird is the head baker.
“Our cookies are big,” she said. “We don’t skimp. They’re all thick. They’re all handmade.”
Brett Fleckner’s cookie advice
The only ingredient Fleckner uses in his cookies that you might not have in your pantry is cake flour. Just as bread flour has a high protein content to make bread chewy, cake flour — sometimes called pastry flour — has a low protein content to make baked goods tender.
He also advises keeping an eye on the cookies as they bake.
“Go by the look,” he said. It might be a good idea to take large cookies out of the oven just before they look dark enough.
“They’re going to keep cooking after they come out of the oven,” he said. Big cookies have more mass and hold onto residual heat more than little ones.
Bird and her staff spent a lot of time developing their cookie recipes to make sure every batch is nearly perfect. As long as conditions are the same and the recipes are followed to the letter, Bird said, the cookies are consistently excellent.
“All of our cookies are made in advance,” she said. “We scoop [the dough] out with ice cream scoops, and they go into the freezer. So that way, when they bake, they’re right from the freezer. So we have convection ovens, and they bake the perfect amount of time and they come out perfect.” Not only does freezing the cookie dough ensure that every cookie starts baking at the same temperature, she said, but it also keeps the dough from spreading too quickly in the oven. “You have to chill. Some cookies you can get away with not chilling, but most cookies you need to chill. You can kind of get away with it if you’re a home baker and you’re putting cornstarch in the dough [to stabilize it]. A lot of times those ones, they do it on purpose so you can bake them right away. But we don’t use cornstarch in our cookies. I have nothing against cornstarch. I love it. But not for cookies.”
Lighthouse Local bakes its cookies “low and slow”, Bird said. “At 300 degrees and for something like 15 minutes. Some cookies take a little longer, but most of them are right at around 15 minutes.
Bird said making her cookies big enough to share has been a priority from the beginning. “Everywhere I looked,” she remembered, “and every cookie that I wanted to eat was big. Bigger is always better for me and I can share it. I have a lot of children and they always want cookies, so I can buy less and then feed more.”
One of Bird’s standout big cookies is a thumbprint cookie the size of a tennis ball.
“Our thumbprints are huge,” she said. “We make them with almond flour, because it keeps them super moist and it’s just better that way. We already had our base cookies and we wanted something new. We actually bought a giant box of almond meal by accident. We didn’t want it to go bad, so I was like, ‘Let’s make a thumbprint.’”
For Bird, one of the best things about the thumbprint cookie is its versatility.
“We can use rotating seasonal jams,” she said. “We’ve been doing raspberry and strawberry for a lot of the winter but now we have guava because we’re getting into the spring. We can do blueberry or we can do lemon curd — we can literally fill it with anything. I just wanted them big. They’re just awfully perfect.”
The thick chocolate chip cookies at Lighthouse Local use two different chocolates. “Inside, chocolate chips,” Bird said. “On the top, chunks of dark chocolate. So it’s semi, it’s dark, it’s milk, and it’s salted.”
The most popular cookie with children, she said, is the Pop Tart Cookie.
“We order Pop-Tarts in bulk and we just crumble them up and we put them in the base cookie with sprinkles, and kids love it. It’s actually one of my favorites too. It’s a fun one. We rotate out cookies. Our really popular one at Christmas is the molasses cookie. That’s my personal favorite, but that’s a winter thing. And we have to phase out snickerdoodles too.”
Because the cookies are so beautiful and look so good, Bird said, many customers buy them as gifts.
Getting thick, flat cookies
Trina Bird advises keeping a close eye on the butter and sugar as they blend together at the beginning of a recipe — a process called “creaming.”
“We are really careful not to over-cream our butter and our sugar together, because sometimes when you do that it melts the butter, so then when you bake the cookies they’re runny. Are they still delicious? Yes. But is it what I want to see? Absolutely not.”
“People can order them in advance, however many they need. So these 4-inch cookies are our standard size but a lot of times people will be like, ‘I do love them, but I don’t want them that big,’ so we can halve them or quarter them. We can make mini cookies or we can do half sizes and we do a lot of that for corporate events weddings, but like when they’re for gifts, yes, we’ll take them and we’ll put them in the individual sleeves and people will give them as gifts.”
“We label each of our batches with the name and who did them and the date so if somebody gets a cookie that’s not up to our standards, we know what went wrong,” Bird said. A well-made cookie will stay fresh for a surprisingly long time, though.
“I’d probably say you were looking at four days before they go stale,” she said. “And if you keep them in a bag, like a Ziploc bag, you’ll get over a week out of them. Anyone who’s keeping a cookie longer than a week has amazing amounts of self-control and I need to know how to do it because it’s not happening in my house.”
Maggie Josti is the owner of Maggie’s Munchies, a retail cookie manufacturer in Nashua. Her cookies, which are sold individually, are substantial.
“They’re all a quarter pound,” she said, “and we like them to be thick and chewy, so the girth is there, with a toasty outer layer. The width is anywhere between 4 and 5 inches, depending on how much they spread.” Because they are thick, the cookies are chewy in the middle but crispy everywhere else.
“The way that we describe it for people,” Josti said, “the best way to describe it, is thick and chewy with a toasty outer layer.”
Josti said the size of her cookies was a secondary consideration when she and her husband started the business.
“Anything that we’ve ever made from our bakery,” she said, “—because we used to make whoopie pies to start — but anything that we did, we made it large enough that you can enjoy it and feel satisfied and not feel like you need to eat like 20 cookies. Because of the quality of the ingredients that we have, it doesn’t weigh you down so much that you can’t enjoy another one. Size wasn’t the main focus to begin with, but it’s just a pleasant characteristic of the product that we created that people seem to enjoy.”
Process versus ingredients
Maggie Josti said that a baker can use identical ingredients in two batches of cookies but end up with completely different products. Even if you don’t melt the butter by over-creaming it with sugar, it will add more air to the dough and change its texture.
“The difference between a cookie and a cake is that you just want to mix it until it’s combined, at least for the kind of cookies that we prefer. If you mix it too long, it aerates it too much and will give you an airier, lighter cookie, which is not what we would prefer. Also, when adding dry ingredients to wet ones, don’t over-mix the dough, which will develop gluten and make the cookies tough.”
“Always mix just to combine,” Josti said.
More important, Josti said, was perfecting the cookie-to-chocolate ratio.
“Anything that we make, I want to make sure it is something that I would want to eat myself,” she said. “So, when it came to the chocolate chips, I wanted to make sure that you had chocolate chips in every bite and not have any bites where there were no chocolate chips. So we basically just took a traditional New England recipe and we added a little bit extra.”
Maggie’s Munchies has five core cookies, with a seasonal sixth flavor.
“That way,” Josti said, “If you get a six-pack you can get one of every flavor. The five core flavors are chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, molasses, double chocolate peanut butter, and sugar cookies. Those are the ones you can always find from us and we’ll be rotating through different seasonal ones depending on the season.
One of the things Josti likes about cookies of any size is that they are an expression of culture.
“The cool part about being in New England is that it’s a melting pot, right?” she asked. “So you have everyone’s backgrounds coming together. And I think that’s what makes this so fun is that yes, we have our classic flavors that are traditional to New England, [and] there are so many different kinds of cookies and you can enjoy them all.”
Do an internet search for “BIG COOKIE, NEW HAMPSHIRE”, and you are likely to fall down a rabbit hole of food blogs, discussion boards and even conspiracy theories. But dig deep enough and you will find the Ogre Chip 1000, arguably the platonic ideal of a Big Cookie.
Made and sold by Lickee’s & Chewy’s Candies & Creamery in Dover, the OC1K weighs half a pound and contains a staggering number of chocolate chips per cookie.
Chris Guerrette is the owner and operator of Lickee’s & Chewy’s. He said the goal was for the Ogre Chip 1000 to be a symbol of his candy shop.
“We wanted to develop a very large cookie that was just a chocolate chip cookie,” he said, “but that kind of represented all the cool flavors we are able to create here. We decided to use what are called 10,000-count chips. These are extremely tiny chocolate chips and that resulted in well over 1,000 chocolate chips in every single cookie. Each one of them is about a half a pound and about an inch and a half to 2 inches tall because of the way we bake them.”
Unlike many Big Cookie bakers, Guerrette is a fan of a domed cookie.
Chris Guerrette’s tip for making the best chocolate chip cookies
Use the highest-quality chocolate you can find.
“The chocolate that we use is a premium top-of-the-line chocolate,” Guerrette said. “It’s not just a generic chocolate chip. It’s actually the same chocolate we use to make all of our gourmet chocolates here. We actually use two types of chocolate in [the cookies]. One of them is a semi-sweet with a cocoa percentage between 50 and 60 percent, and a second one that’s a little bit darker and a little larger. That one is 65 percent.”
“They’re tall; they kind of look like muffin tops. A lot of people ask if there’s something in the center. We cook them to look like that,” Guerrette said. His goal was the elusive tender-in-the-middle-crispy-along-the-edges texture.
“We spent maybe two months testing different recipes, making samples, and then finally settled on this recipe and we’ve been making it ever since. It got to the point where I didn’t want to try a single other chocolate chip cookie because I was tasting two or three batches a day at one point. I mean, the slightest thing, butter, sugar, refrigerated, non-refrigerated, as far as before baking, all sorts of testing until we were really happy with it.
Roan Brantley is a professional cook and a passionate home baker. She sees big cookies as something quintessentially American.
“I feel like Americans are just kind of generally drawn to big things,” she said. I feel like people are impressed by the sheer size of things”
Although she likes big cookies, size is not as important to Brantly as consistency.
“Uniformity is big,” she said. “I would recommend weighing the dough to make sure that you’re getting similar sizes. There’s really good hacks on getting them all nice and round if that’s a problem. I envy the people who manage to make extremely tall cookies. I can’t figure it out, so unless you’re sticking a marshmallow in the middle or something, I don’t know how we’re getting all that height in cookies.”
Brantley sees cookies as a glue that strengthens relationships between people.
“I really enjoy making snickerdoodles,” she said, “because that’s all of my friends’ favorites. So every time I’m making a few trays of them I know I’m about to make like 20 people really happy. I think that we should be sharing more of them. Bake more cookies. Bring them to your neighbors. Bring them to your friends.”
Roan Brantley’s cookie hack
“Chill your dough for 24 hours. It makes a world of difference. A lot of people don’t really acknowledge quite how much of a difference it makes, but your cookie’s just going to have such a better texture if you chill it and wait the full day. I think it definitely gives everything a chance to blend a bit more, to meld those flavors together as well, along with letting the dough hydrate and that gluten give it that chew and hold it together nicely.”
A Cookie Recipe to Build Friendships On – Butterscotch and Potato Chip Big Cookies
This is a recipe adapted from one by Christina Tosi of Milk Bar.
150 grams (about 90 percent of a 7-ounce bag) of salt and pepper kettle chips, crushed into cornflake-sized pieces – so, eat a handful of chips, then pour the rest into a bowl and crush them lightly with your fist
1 cup (two sticks) butter
1¼ cups (247 g) sugar
2/3 cup (132 g) brown sugar
1 large egg
1 Tablespoon good scotch – I like Glenlivet
1¾ cups (210 g) all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder – this is a very small amount; these are going to be large, thin cookies
¼ teaspoon baking soda
1¼ teaspoons coarse salt
1¼ cups (125 g) mini marshmallows – about half a bag
2/3 cup (122 g) mini chocolate chips
10½ ounces (300 g) butterscotch hard candies
Break up the butterscotch candies. This will be the most tedious part of this recipe. After a lot of experimentation I’ve found that the most efficient way to do this is to lay five to 10 of the wrapped candies on your counter and tap each of them with something heavy — in my case the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, which is the rough size and shape of a billy club. The idea here is to break each candy into three or four pieces, not to crush it to powder. Empty the pieces from their wrappers into a cereal-sized bowl. If you have a young but greedy child, offer to pay them one cent for each wrapper they empty. This will speed things along, and if they have the attention span to stick with it, it will set you back about three bucks.
Cream the butter and sugars together, then whip on high speed for several minutes, until the mixture is light and fluffy. These cookies are going to spread out very thin, so beating air into the dough will help equalize things.
Add the egg and the scotch, and whip on high speed for another few minutes. You will probably want to scrape down the sides of the bowl at some point during this process. These cookies are complicated enough; they don’t need the emotional bitterness of cookie dough that got stuck to the side of the bowl and felt left out.
Mix in the dry ingredients — the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Start slowly, or they will puff out and cover you and your counter with flour, leaving you looking like a character from a classic Warner Bros. cartoon. You’re mixing this until it just barely comes together into a “shaggy” dough.
Mix in the butterscotch pieces, the marshmallows, the chocolate chips and the potato chip pieces. If you have a modest-sized mixer, the bowl may come alarmingly close to being completely full. Don’t panic. Mix things together as well as you can.
Form the dough into 2-inch balls and place on a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat, then flatten them slightly into small mutant hockey pucks. Cover them with plastic wrap and chill them for at least an hour.
(At this point, you might have some leftover debris in the bottom of your bowl that wasn’t doughy enough to form into balls. You can bake this at 350°F for about 10 minutes to make a crumbly topping for ice cream. You won’t be sorry.)
Place four or five cookie pucks on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat, spread as far apart as possible — they will spread a great deal. Bake at 350°F for about 12 minutes. When you take them out of the oven, they will look like a mess. Don’t panic. Let them cool entirely before removing them from the pan. If, unlike me, you don’t own an unreasonable number of baking sheets, when the cookies have cooled for 10 minutes or so, gently slide the parchment paper onto a cool counter, and lay down a new piece of parchment on the baking sheet.
These cookies require a bit of effort to make the first time around, but they are totally worth it. They are outrageously thin, yet chunky; crispy along the edges, but bendy and chewy. The butterscotch is shockingly good but totally works as a baked good. Making these will become an event.
Mentioned spots offering a big cookie
The Bakeshop on Kelley Street (171 Kelley St., Manchester, 624-3500, thebakeshoponkelleystreet.com) is open Thursdays and Fridays from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Bagel Alley (1 Eldridge St., Nashua, 882-9343) is open Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturdays from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and Sundays from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Lighthouse Local (21 Kilton Road, Bedford, 716-6983, lighthouse-local.com) is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and weekends from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Maggie’s Munchies (therealmaggiesmunchies.com) cookies are available online and at events.
Lickee’s & Chewy’s Candies & Creamery (53 Washington St., Dover, 343-1799, lickeesnchewys.com) is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sundays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. According to Owner Chris Guerrette, customers will soon be able to order the Ogre Chips 1,000 cookie from his new website, ogrechocolates.com.
