Have you ever eaten a doughnut and thought to yourself, “This is excellent. I really, really like doughnuts, but I think it would be better if it were crispier, somehow.”?
Tanya Grenier has you covered.
She and her husband are the brains behind Tanya’s Waffle-Donuts. The Boscawen businesswoman described her product this way: “They look like a waffle,” she said. “They taste like a doughnut, but they’re not deep fried. They’re all made from homemade recipes, made from scratch.”
The idea for the waffle-doughnut came from a family trip, Grenier recalled.
“We were at an Airbnb with our daughter and our son-in-law,” she said. Her daughter asked her dad if he could make doughnuts for breakfast. “So they had all the ingredients to make them, but we didn’t check and they ended up not having oil. So we were like, ‘Oh, we can’t deep fry them.’ We ended up making pancakes with the batter. They looked like a pancake in a pan, but they tasted like a doughnut. They were amazing, but then my husband said, ‘You know what would be really cool, though? If it was the shape of a waffle it would be a little easier to pick up and like look really cool with a waffle shape.’”
Courtesy photo.
The Greniers spent three years developing a recipe that would work.
“Basically,” Tanya said, “you can’t use a waffle recipe or a doughnut recipe. What you need to do is you’ve got to kind of combine them to get them to rise because most doughnut recipes are made to be deep-fried, and these are not.” Eventually, she said, the recipe came together. “The best part of these is they have less sugar than a regular doughnut, but they still taste just like a doughnut, but they’re not greasy. They’re light and fluffy. They’re not fried in oil at all. They’re all made in a waffle iron.”
Once the base recipe was worked out, the Greniers were able to develop a large number of variations on the doughnuts themselves, and an equally large number of frosting types, which have lent themselves to many combinations.
“We make a cake waffle doughnut, which is our original waffle doughnut,” Tanya said. “It has a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of nutmeg. We make a chocolate waffle doughnut, which is like a milk chocolate, almost — not a dark chocolate but like a milk chocolate doughnut. We make maple doughnuts and apple doughnuts. We’ve done banana doughnuts. We do a cornbread waffle doughnut. We do a potato waffle doughnut. We do carrot cake ones.”
The Greniers package some waffle-doughnuts for individual sale, but they are happiest when they serve them hot and crispy from their food truck.
“The food truck is called the Waffle Donut Wagon,” Grenier said, “and then when we sell them pre-packaged it’s called Tanya’s Homemade Waffle Donut. We usually only sell [the individually wrapped ones] at special indoor craft events. We’ve done horse shows, we’ve done weddings, birthdays, bridal showers, pretty much anything you can think of. We do that with the truck just because we can offer food items plus they’re hot off the press as we call it. We cook them to order so they get them hot off the press with everything like the frosting is like put right on top melted.”
Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon
Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon can be found at events throughout New Hampshire and can cater any event. Call 785-6283 for more information, or search for “Waffle Donut Wagon” on Facebook or @waffledonutwagon on Instagram.
• New ownership: The Sal Terrae line of spices has been purchased by Smokin’ Tin Roof Hot Sauce (899-7369, smokintinroof.com), according to Smokin’ Tin Roof owner Phil Pelletier. According to a post on Facebook, “We are very excited to announce and welcome a new line as a part of the Smokin’ Tin Roof family, Sal Terrae Spice Co!! You will now be able to purchase these great products at events, future store locations, and online.”
• Taco Tour participating restaurants: With just two weeks left until the Taco Tour (tacotourmanchester.com), Manchester’s biggest food day of the year, the Greater Manchester Chamber released the names of more than 90 participating restaurants and organizations in an April 9 press release. The list includes businesses as different from each other as 815 Cocktails & Provisions, New Hampshire Fisher Cats, and Thai Food Connection. To view the full list of participants (as of April 8), visit manchester-chamber.org/taco-tour-manchester-2025-list-of-participating-restaurants.
• Chili cook-off: Rockingham Brewing Co. (1 Corporate Park Drive, Unit 1, Derry, 216-2324, rockinghambrewing.com) will host its Fourth Annual Chili Cook-Off on Saturday, April 19. On its Facebook page the brewery posted, “This is a non-ticketed event. We’re open 1 to 8 p.m. and as usual, chili & seating are both first come, first served. … BUT our worthy competitors are making TWICE as much chili this year, so there should be plenty for all. Please be patient as we work to get you all served ASAP.” The names of this year’s chilis are “Piggy Back,” “Silence of the Hams,” “Night Owl,” “Jort Munder” and “Ten.”
• Cooking with kids: According to The Culinary Playground’s (16 Manning St., Derry, 339-1664, culinary-playground.com) website, there are openings in two cooking classes for children this week. On Saturday, April 19, from 10 a.m. to noon, children ages 6 to 10 can learn to make a carrot cake trifle. There is a second class from 1 to 3 p.m. for kids 10 and up. On Wednesday, April 23, preschoolers can make carrot apple muffins in sessions at 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.
• Discover Wild New Hampshire Day brings the state’s outdoor adventures to the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department (11 Hazen Drive in Concord) on Saturday, April 19, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The free event features more than 100 educational and experiential exhibits, live animals, archery, casting, flying, an air-rifle range, retriever dogs, crafts, a Fish and Game biologist, a food truck alley and more according to the website. See wildlife.nh.gov/dwnh for a map with participating presenters and activities.
More museum
• Get an extra day to see SEE Science Center (200 Bedford St. in Manchester; see-sciencecenter.org), which is open Mondays, April 21 and April 28, for April school vacation in addition to its regular Tuesday-through-Sunday days of operation. SEE is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. Admission costs $14 for ages 3 and up.
• The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center (2 Institute Drive in Concord; starhop.com) is slated to be open daily Wednesday, April 16, through Sunday, May 4, from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission costs $13 for adults, $12 for 62+ and ages 13 through college, $10 for ages 3 to 12 and free for ages 2 and under. Planetarium shows are an additional $7 for ages 3 and up.
Papas Feroces
• The Fisher Cats continue a series of games against the Harrisburg Senators. On Thursday, April 17, at 6:35 p.m., it’s New hampSHIRE Night, with a theme around wizards and adventure. On Friday, April 18, at 6:35 p.m. the team will play as their Copa de la Diversion alter egos Gatos Feroces. On Saturday, April 19, at 4:05 p.m., the team will play as the New Hampshire Space Potatoes, honoring the Granite State’s potato and UFO history. And at the Sunday, April 20, game at 1:35 p.m., the first 1,000 fans will get a free scarf. See milb.com/new-hampshire.
Storytime
• Bookery Manchester (844 Elm St. in Manchester; bookerymht.com) will host a storytime with author Duane “Archie” Archambault and his new book Conga’s Rescue Adventures, illustrated by Kolorful Highlights, on Saturday, April 19, at 1 p.m. Reserve a spot online.
Bunnies & eggs
• The Carriage Shack Farm, 5 Dan Hill Road in Londonderry, carriageshackfarmllc.org, will host an Easter Bunny Party on Saturday, April 19, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Kids can collect six eggs from egg stations, decorate their own Easter egg, take photos with the Easter Bunny and meet the farm animals, according to the website. Admission costs $12.95 per person for ages 16 and up, $11.95 for seniors and military, and $10.95 for children 15 and under, the website said. Buy tickets online or purchase them at the gate, the website said.
• Hudson’s Best Easter Egg Hunt will take place Saturday, April 19, with sessions at 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. at Inner Dragon Martial Arts, 77 Derry Road in Hudson. The event will feature egg hunts, a photo op with the Easter Bunny and more, according to the description at funnels.hudsonmartialart.com/egghunt, where you can register for a time slot.
• Charmingfare Farm in Candia wraps up its Egg-citing Egg Hunt this Saturday, April 19, and Sundays, April 20 (Easter Sunday). Kids between the ages of 2 and 12 can hunt for a dozen eggs in Grandpa’s Barn, the website said. The event will also include an opportunity to meet the Easter Bunny, visit farm animals (including new spring babies) and more, according to the website. Time slots between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. are available on those days. Admission costs $29 per person.
The New Boston Historical Society wonders what you might know about an old urn that’s now in the Whipple Free Library. It’s 12 inches tall.
We have a photo made from a glass negative that shows this urn and its twin in our town’s first public library, c. 1890-1900. This library was in one corner of what’s now Dodge’s Store. In 1927 a new library was built, and the two urns plus the clock that’s between them were moved across the street to the brick building that’s now our museum. (You spoke about antique collecting here in September 2011). I saw no maker’s marks anywhere on the urn, including under its base. Thanks for reading this!
Dan
Hello, Dan.
Your silver-plated mantel clock set looked great on the fireplace mantel in the photo you sent. To me that makes it a great piece of New Boston’s memorabilia.
Mantel clock sets were very popular during the late 1800s and early 1900s (Victorian era). Some were simple, some elegant. They were ceramic, silver, silver-plated, etc. I have seen some of the vases that weren’t even deep and were weighted with cement to just appear vase-like. I think your value lies in the maker of the mantel clock and its condition. The one fumed (darkened aged silver look) vase is beautiful but its value is now in being a vase. It’s unfortunate for the loss of the other one.
Depending on age, style, maker, condition and material, values can range from a couple hundred dollars to thousands. But that is for a three-piece set. I think, as is, values could be in the range of a few hundred dollars together.
Keeping both pieces with the photo of the three-piece set is a sweet memory.
Donna Welch has spent more than 35 years in the antiques and collectibles field, appraising and instructing. If you have questions about an antique or collectible send a clear photo and information to Donna at [email protected], or call her at 391-6550.
Donna Welch has spent more than 35 years in the antiques and collectibles field, appraising and instructing. Her new location is an Antique Art Studio located in Dunbarton, NH where she is still buying and selling. If you have questions about an antique or collectible send a clear photo and information to Donna at [email protected], or call her at 391-6550.
Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 was followed by a surge of interest in aviation. This so-called “Lindbergh Boom” inspired construction of a pair of runways on what’s now Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. A hangar and administrative building were added in the 1930s, and it became an Army base as World War II approached.
Today few physical traces of this history remain. Leah Dearborn, an Associate Director at Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, set out to find and document memories of Grenier Field, as the facility came to be known. Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front was published late last year.
Dearborn will talk about her book and take questions during an April 18 appearance at the Bookery in Manchester. In a recent phone interview she shared her motivations for writing it, along with some of the fascinating things learned during her research.
“It’s an interesting era in history, and also one that’s slipping by us very quickly,” she said. “I think part of this project was driven by the urgency of some of this history. If we don’t do something about it right now, the remaining people who can tell us about it might not be able to in the near future.”
The story begins with a humorous twist: Civic rivalry is a big reason why the airfield came to be in the first place.
“Charles Lindbergh was doing a tour across the United States, and when he got to Manchester there wasn’t an airport,” Dearborn said. “So he had to skip Manchester and go to Concord. That spurred the movement for Manchester Airport to be built; I like to call it a spite airport.”
Many of those interviewed for the book were children during the war years, and their recollections were surprising. Flying was still relatively new, and accidents were frequent. In fact, American fatalities in flight training were significantly higher than those sustained in air combat.
“By 1943, there were six fatal training accidents per day,” Dearborn said.
Many crashes happened at Grenier, she continued. “Local kids would bike out to them, just out of curiosity … and they’d pull little souvenirs off the plane. Just learning about the childhood of these local kids who spent all their time at the base or around it, watching from afar, was pretty interesting.”
The base was named for Second Lieutenant Jean Grenier, a Manchester native who crashed in Utah while scouting a flight route. He was one of many Army pilots who quickly took over commercial mail delivery following the so-called Airmail Scandal in 1934. A rapid handoff of responsibilities, coupled with a brutal winter, resulted in many flying deaths.
“This was being done mainly by pilots with very limited experience, in open cockpit aircraft, in some of the worst weather in decades,” Dearborn said. “A lot of them lost their lives in the few months that this was planned, and Jean Grenier was, unfortunately, one of those.”
As Dearborn researched her book, a group of museum volunteers were engaged in reprocessing the archives. “When they found something in their effort that might connect back to what I was doing, they would leave it on my desk,” she recalled. “I’d walk in in the morning and find this stack of paper … that was really helpful.”
Among the valuable finds was a trove of newspaper clippings spanning the war’s early years to the 1950s. “Somebody at Grenier in the military was keeping tabs on the war abroad,” Dearborn said. “Anytime a New Hampshire soldier … made the news, somebody at a desk was taking a pair of scissors and cutting these out.”
At the Bookery, Dearborn will dive into favorite Grenier memories and display some photos. However, the best moments frequently happen after her presentation.
“People come with their own stories, and sometimes that’s where I get the best leads for new writing projects,” she said. “I ended up talking to a man who fought during the Battle of the Bulge for this book, and that’s exactly how I met him. I gave a talk on the history of ballooning, and a friend of his came up at the end and said, ‘You really ought to talk to this guy, he witnessed the Hindenburg fly over New England.’ Stuff like that is pretty invaluable.”
Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front w/ author Leah Dearborn
When: Friday, April 18, 5-7 p.m. Where: Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester, Tickets: free; reserve at bookerymht.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.
Chocolate chip cookies at Bagel Alley. Photo by John Fladd.
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.
Cookies at The Bakeshop on Kelley Street. Photo by John Fladd.
“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.
Variety of cookies from Lighthouse Local. Courtesy photo.
“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”
Butterscotch and Potato Chip Big Cookies. Photo by John Fladd.
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.
