Recipe: vanilla and cocoa sugar cookies
A crisp, soft and chewy cookie for the indecisive
The best of both worlds with the taste of vanilla and cocoa in one sugar cookie. With crisp edges giving way to a core that is soft and slightly chewy, this recipe can be used as a base to which you add a myriad of other flavours, and don’t limit yourself to just one addition. This dough is divided in two once the vanilla cookie base is made, with one half receiving a dose of dutch cocoa powder mixed in, but you could divide the dough into three or four separate flavours. Some ideas for add ins could be ground instant coffee, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, matcha or freeze-dried fruits.
I experimented with coating each half in different sugars–the vanilla in granulated, the cocoa in dark brown sugar–as I was curious to see if it would create a more interesting cookie, both visually and to eat. I found however that this was an unnecessary and fiddly task with little reward. To look at, you couldn’t tell the cookies that had different sugars apart from the ones that had granulated sugar only, and personally I preferred the taste of the ones coated in just granulated.
Makes 15 cookies
Ingredients
plain flour 270g
baking powder 3g
baking soda 2g
flaky sea salt 1/2 tsp
butter 235g at room temperature
granulated sugar 250 g, plus more for coating the cookie dough
medium egg 1
vanilla extract 9g, or 1/2 vanilla pod
dutch cocoa powder 2 heaped tbsp
Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together in a medium bowl and set aside.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together your butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Scrape down the bowl and add your egg and vanilla and mix until well incorporated.
Add your dry mix to your stand mixer bowl and mix until just combined, and no flour shows–over mixing will make the cookies tough.
Remove half of the dough and place in a bowl. Add your cocoa powder to the bowl of the stand mixer and mix until well combined, scraping down the bowl half way.
I find that portioning out the cookie dough by weighing it out creates the most uniform cookies, and is also easier than measuring by tbsp as you can just pinch the dough straight out of the bowl. Weigh out 25g portions of the vanilla dough and place on a baking sheet, then repeat with the cocoa dough. Combine a portion of each of the doughs by rolling them into a ball using the palms of your hands. At this point, you can refrigerate until ready to bake (up to 3 days in the fridge), or you can bake right away.
Pre-heat oven to 160C fan. Prepare a baking tray with baking paper. Pour granulated sugar onto a plate and roll the cookie dough balls in it to coat them. Place the dough balls onto the prepared baking tray, leaving 2 inches between each ball to allow room for spread. Bake for 12 minutes, or until the cookie edges have started to turn a very light golden. Remove from the oven* and leave to cool on the tray for 10 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack to cool completely.
*a trick to ensure your cookies are perfectly round–using a small bowl that completely covers the circumference of the cookie, place the bowl over the cookie, just out the oven, and in a circular motion move the bowl around the cookie, ensuring you catch all the edges as you go. Do a full circle motion a few times around each cookie and you should be left with perfectly round cookies.