When I moved to Boston, I obviously lost my source of salty sweet delight so I have been on the hunt for a recipe that would get me close to the perfection of Elmwood. Well, I have found it! I have taken Smitten Kitchen's Salted Chocolate Chunk Cookie recipe and adapted it ever so slightly for the texture I was looking for in my ultimate cookie. Smitten Kitchen actually took the recipe from Not Without Salt and mixed it with the recipe from a version in the Date Night In cookbook. As you can see it's a long chain of connections to get to my recipe, and the changes are ever so slight. Take this as a lesson in baking though: Don't be afraid to make changes to a recipe. It may take some trial and error to get to exactly where you want to be, but it's fun to experiment and the end result is always pat-on-the-back satisfying. Sometimes you need a good base to work off of to get to where you want to be.

In my recipe below, I use bread flour instead of all purpose flour. I will go into the difference between flours in another post to come soon, but the gist of it is that bread flour has more protein resulting a slightly denser and more structured cookie. The cookie won't spread like you would expect so I actually formed them into the thick disc shape I was looking for before I baked. This gave me a soft cookie all around. No fear of crispy outer edges on these guys... and just for the record sometimes I want the crispy edges, but for my perfect Elmwood replica I did not want to risk it. The second thing I did was mix the chocolates. I did half milk chocolate and half 85% dark bitter chocolate. This gave a variance in texture and taste. Sweet but not sickeningly so. The super dark chocolate has no added sugar so helps to really highlight the salty crunch on top. The last thing I did was use salted butter (Kerry Gold to be exact) and dropped the added salt down to just a pinch. I wanted most of the salt to come from the top sea salt but didn't want to lose any flavor in the cookie batter. I think these small adjustments got me to exactly where I wanted to be.