Regular sized homemade cookies are always delicious, but they are never quite as visually impressive as the giant cookies on display in coffee shops and bakeries. While the true measure of a good cookie is in its flavor, it doesn’t hurt if the actual measurements of the cookie are as big as its taste.

And these are some very big cookies.

Each one is just about 6-inches in diameter and, as if their size weren’t impressive enough, they’re very tasty, too. The cookie recipe is easy to make and takes relatively few ingredients. In fact, it is a bit of a takeoff of the ever-popular Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe - but then again, so are many chocolate chip cookie recipes. It uses lots of vanilla extract and brown sugar, along with a generous amount of chocolate chips and butter, so it is quite rich. The cookies spread a lot and end up being fairly thin and very chewy from all that brown sugar. For a large cookie, I think that this is a really good balance because with a thicker cookie you run the risk of it being either cakey from the addition of too much flour or simply far too filling to eat the whole thing at once (and I’m not one for eating half a cookie and then walking away).

As I said, these cookies spread out quite a bit as they bake, so be sure to leave about 6-inches between each 1/4-cup ball of dough. I baked only 3 or 4 cookies on each baking sheet. Fortunately, since the recipe only makes about 14 cookies, limiting the number on each sheet doesn’t mean that you’ll spend hours in front of the oven to get the whole batch baked.

I only used chocolate chips, but you can make these a bit more substantial by adding up to 3/4 cup of chopped, toasted nuts, as well. Try to get an even distribution when stirring chocolate chips or nuts into the cookie dough; since the cookies spread out a lot, you run the risk of having one cookie with only a couple of chips and one that is packed unless you pay a bit of attention when shaping the cookies. Worst case scenario, make sure you have a few extra chocolate chips on hand and just tuck them into the unbaked dough wherever you need them.

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I have never been a big fan of nuts in brownies. They’re usually included to provide a crunchy contrast to a fudgy, chocolaty treat. After eating many brownies that were more nuts than chocolate as a kid (before I wisely realized I should carefully inspect the brownie before eating it), I decided that a really good brownie is nice when it’s fudgy and doesn’t need a contrast besides a glass of milk. I almost never included nuts in brownies after that.

Lately, I’ve been looking for different twists for brownies, however. I loved the crunchy crust on the Caramel Oatmeal Brownies I tried and the fun flavors of my Peppermint Cookies and Cream Brownies. So I decided to set aside my bias and look into working with nuts. I immediately discarded the idea of walnuts (the go-to brownie nut) and opted instead for some toasted pistachios. They have a fantastic green color and a lovely nutty, buttery flavor that complements that of chocolate.

The double chocolate brownie base is very rich and made with both dark chocolate and milk chocolate. Melted dark chocolate (I used 65% Callebaut) is incorporated into a not-too-sweet batter and provides a surprisingly intense flavor to the brownies. Milk chocolate chips, or milk chocolate chunks, are mixed in alongside the pistachios to sweeten up the dessert a bit - and because I think that milk chocolate really goes well with pistachios in general. The brownies are moist and rich, but are not too fudgy. In fact, I would say that they almost melt into your mouth, neither cake-like nor gooey. The flavors and consistency balance exceptionally well here and these brownies will definitely be made by me again, even though they have nuts in them.

Extra brownies can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge or freezer. I actually like them cold and crumbling them up to use as an ice cream topping isn’t a half-bad idea either!

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Honey can be a great ingredient to bake with because it really adds a lot of moisture to things. It also helps to keep baked goods moist over time, so a cake or bread that has honey in it will often taste fresher than one without after it has been stored for a couple of days. Agave syrup, or agave nectar, has this moisturizing property, as well, and I took advantage of it by including it in this chocolate cake recipe.

The chocolate cake is a fairly basic one, the kind that I would have wanted to have a giant slice of after school when I was little. It is more substantial than some cakes, somewhere halfway between a very fluffy cake and a pound cake, but is very moist and tender. Agave syrup replaces some, but not all, of the sugar in the recipe. I found that the finished cake had a slightly better texture when some sugar was still used. The agave sweetener doesn’t have a strong flavor profile and is even more subtle than honey, so you can’t taste any unusual flavors in the cake to detract from the chocolate

For the frosting, I went with cream cheese. I generally prefer cream cheese frostings because they’re a bit more interesting to my tastes than a regular buttercream. I debated about using honey or agave syrup in the frosting, wondering whether I should opt for the more flavorful ingredient or stick with the same sweetener I used in the cake. Ultimately, I opted for honey. It matches well with the cream cheese and adds another interesting hint of flavor to the finished cake. Fee free to use agave syrup, if you like.

Be careful not to overbake this cake. As moisturizing as agave syrup can be, it also can help dry out a cake quite quickly if it is left in the oven too long. Use a toothpick to check the cake a bit early. It’s ok if a few moist - not wet - crumbs stick to the toothpick. You’ll want to pull it out of the oven before the cake really begins to pull away from the sides of the pan.
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I’ve had french silk pies before, but I’ve never had one like this. The concept of a french silk pie is that it is a chocolate mousse set up in a pie crust, the smooth texture of the mousse providing the “silk” part of the pie. Most pies that are sold under this name are relatively dense and chocolaty affairs. Chocolate is the first thing you notice when you bite into a piece, not “silk,” and the texture is generally only light thanks to a generous amount of whipped cream.

This french silk pie is all about the silk. The texture is amazingly lightly, so smooth it’s almost as though you’re eating some crazy hybrid of chocolate ice cream and air because it is served cold and melts almost instantly on your tongue. Amazing is a very accurate descriptor here and, now that I’ve had this version of french silk, I don’t think I’ll ever look at the other variety in the same way again.

The recipe is another Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, a runner up (and $1,000 best-in-class winner) in the 3rd annual competition in 1951. You need a baked pie crust - I’d recommend a traditional, flaky crust over a graham cracker one simply because the crunchy graham crust will dominate the texture of the dessert - but the filling involves no cooking at all. Butter, sugar, chocolate and eggs are whipped up to an impossible lightness with an electric mixer. The chocolate flavor is not intense, but it is lovely, and you can always garnish the pie with shavings of chocolate if you want to boost the flavor for serving.

Make sure all your ingredients, especially the eggs, are at room temperature before beginning to ensure you get maximum volume. This recipe does contain raw eggs, so if you’re uncomfortable with that, either try using pasteurized eggs or try another recipe. If you decide to give it a go, I guarantee that you won’t regret a single bite of it.

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I’d like to dedicate this recipe to anyone who thinks that Pillsbury Bake Off recipes are nothing more than prepackaged products rearranged to make variations on a refrigerator biscuit theme. Some of them are - it’s a competition sponsored by General Mills and many name brand, prepackaged products are qualified for use in the entered recipes - but there are just as many recipes that start with ordinary ingredients and are the type of dishes that any home cook/baker might cook up on a given day. And, of course, the contest was started not only to promote their brand, but to give home bakers an outlet to showcase (and be rewarded for) their culinary prowess.

Getting back to this particular recipe, it was a finalist in Pillsbury’s 7th Grand National baking competition - a.k.a. the 1956 Pillsbury Bake off. It didn’t win the grand prize, but the woman who submitted the recipe (Carol Markford from Pennsylvania) must have been very close because these brownies are creative, delicious and easily one of the most addictive brownies I’ve ever tasted.

They are essentially brownies with an oatmeal cookie crust on the bottom. The cookie layer is simple and heavy on both sugar and oats. It is partially baked before the brownie topping is added to the pan, giving the sugars a chance to begin to caramelize and harden (hence the “caramel” part of the brownie name). The brownie layer is added on top of the hot oatmeal cookie layer and the whole thing is baked through. When they come out of the oven and cool down, you end up with a batch of rich brownies with a good chocolate flavor and an amazingly flavorful crust. I say that the brownies don’t quite make the “moist and fudgy” category because they are relatively thin, though they are very moist and tender. They contrast perfectly with the crisp, and slightly candy-like caramel-oatmeal base.

This recipe is easy to make and takes very little active work time. The only problem I encountered was spreading the brownie batter into the pan on top of the cookies. The crust is only partially baked and very hot when you add the brownie batter. As a result, the still-soft cookie dough moves around a bit when you try to spread out the brownies. Don’t worry if it looks a bit messy while you’re working; take your time and spread lightly and carefully. Using an ungreased pan will help hold the oatmeal cookies in place and there should be just enough butter in the recipe that cutting the brownies and serving them should be no problem.

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Chocolate and peanut butter have an interesting relationship. The flavors pair well together in just about every application you can think of, from candies and cookies to the simple, decadent late-night-snack of peanut butter and chocolate sandwiches. The interesting thing is how delicate the balance between chocolate and peanut butter really is. It’s easy to use a too-sweet milk chocolate and make sugar the overly dominant flavor in the pairing. It’s equally easy to use a dark chocolate that is too aggressive, or in too large a quantity, and will overwhelm the peanut butter flavor.

As long as you keep the goal of getting a good peanut butter flavor and an equally good, not dominant, chocolate flavor, it’s not too hard to put together things like homemade peanut butter cups. Other recipes may be a bit harder to adapt and when I set out to make a chocolate peanut butter cookie, I knew that I wanted to start with a cookie base that had a very prominent peanut butter flavor.

My favorite flourless peanut butter cookies fit the bill. The recipe is primarily peanut butter, sugar and egg and almost nothing competes with the straight peanut butter flavor. I added a smallish amount of cocoa powder to the batter to make it a chocolate one. The cocoa powder has a very good chocolate flavor; it is my favorite way to boost the chocolate profile of a recipe. Plus, it does little else to the chemistry of the recipe, while something like melted chocolate adds more solids and more fat to the batter.

The resulting cookies were outstanding. They were chewy, with a hint of crunch on the outside, and were as addictive as any peanut butter and chocolate candy I’ve had. I used crunchy, organic peanut butter to get small pieces of peanut into the cookies (a non-organic national brand, like Jif or Skippy, will work just fine in this recipe, too) and stirred in some peanut butter and chocolate swirled chips (a product from Nestle), too. You can use plain chocolate chips if you want things to lean more towards the chocolate side, or peanut butter chips if you want more peanut.

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