Okay, so I’ve never actually had a subscription to Gourmet, but I’ve always wanted one. As the Times said this week, Gourmet was kinda like the New Yorker of food magazines: erudite, fancy, well-researched and well-edited. I always pick up a copy when I’m traveling, and I leaf through issues at bookstores, looking wistfully at all the scrumptious things I have yet to bake, and all the beautiful places I’ll probably never go. Oh, well. They have a great number of Gourmet’s recipes up on Epicurious, so I suppose there will still be at least one way in which to revel in the glory of things past.

So as I was mourning the loss of my imagined possible future subscription to Gourmet, I thought it would be a fitting farewell to bake something from the magazine. And as luck would have it, Kenan was hosting a drawing night, so I would have an apartment full of starving, broke-ass cartoonists on which to foist my baked wares. I was looking for something fairly simple, as it’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and I was tired and stressed out. I settled on a double chocolate chip cookie recipe. Gourmet calls for dried sour cherries, but I couldn’t find any in the Union Square Whole Foods. I’m sure they had them, but I was hungry and frustrated and claustrophobic and really just wanted to get the heck out of Manhattan, so I gave up and grabbed some shredded coconut instead.

twice the butter! twice the drawing!

Once I was home, after braving the epic line at the store and the L to G transfer, I got to work. The recipe is pretty much just your basic drop cookie with some nice little flourishes: butter, brown sugar, milk chocolate chips, Dutch-process cocoa powder, toasted pecans, and sour cherries (in lieu of which, as I mentioned above, I used shredded coconut). I started creaming the butter with the brown sugar and very quickly noticed something was not quite right: the butter just wouldn’t get fluffy, no matter how much I whipped it. I knew that wasn’t normal, but I chalked it up to the butter having been a bit too cool and moved on. I added the eggs, and still, the mixture was just too thick, and was starting to make my arm feel like it was going to fall off.

It was then that I realized I had added way, way too much butter. You see, the recipe calls for 1 1/2 sticks, but I, in my frazzled post-work, post-grocery shopping state, read it as 1 1/2 cups, which is, you know, twice as much. Oopsie daisy. It was kinda too late to scratch the whole thing and start over, so I added the rest of the ingredients and threw the first tray in the oven, thinking, “how bad can it be, really? Butter makes everything more delicious”. Well, I’ll tell you, dear ones: the cookies smelled amazing, all butter and chocolate and yum. But they spread all over the pan, because there was too much fat and not enough other stuff, and they couldn’t hold together to save their lives. I tasted one, and I thought I was going to die, both from pure buttery deliciousness and from clogged arteries. I was afraid that they weren’t salvageable, but I tried doubling the rest of the ingredients and mixing them separately before adding them to the already prepared batter. I knew that the proportions would be off because I had already made a batch, and I also knew that the chemistry wouldn’t be quite right because the order in which the ingredients were added was messed up, but I wanted to give it a try so as to not have entirely wasted all the (expensive!) nice ingredients bought specially for this occasion. I whipped two more eggs with the brown sugar and then folded in the dry ingredients, more chocolate chips, coconut and pecans. I mixed that together as best as I could with a spoon, but it was all too thick, so… I did the rest of the mixing with my hands. Unorthodox? Yes. Possibly unsanitary? Well, I washed my hands, but yes. Fun? Absolutely. After finally getting it all to meld together, I put a second tray in the oven, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t be a complete waste.

And you know what? They were fantastic. Heavenly, almost. Okay, so probably my expectations were lowered because I had made a huge mistake, but really, I swear, they were good. I was feeling a bit iffy about the milk chocolate chips, because in general I’m a strictly bittersweet kinda lady, but the creaminess of the chips blended perfectly with the richness of the cocoa powder, and the coconut and pecans made for a subtle and pleasing texture. I had two of ’em instead of eating dinner, which seemed like a good idea at the time but which I cannot in good conscience advise if you’re looking to avoid a sugar hangover. And these cookies probably could be even better if I hadn’t screwed up the proportions. I’ll have to try them again soon to test this hypothesis.

So yeah. Crisis averted. Cookies baked. Artists fed. Now let’s all go take a nap, eh?

double chocolate coconut cookies

double chocolate coconut cookies (adapted from Gourmet magazine)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and set a tray on the middle rack. In a small bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.

In a large bowl or in the bowl of a standing mixer, whip the butter and brown sugar at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Reduce speed to low and add the dry ingredients, mixing until just combined. Add the chocolate, nuts, and coconut and mix until just incorporated.

With an ice cream scoop or large spoon, drop the dough onto two ungreased baking sheets, leaving about 2 inches of space around each cookie. Flatten slightly with the back of the spoon or scoop.

Bake 12 to 14 minutes or until puffed and set through, switching position of sheets halfway through. Transfer cookies to a rack to cool.

photos by the tremendously terrific Kenan