I’m a huge fan of hot stuff and sweet stuff and these cookies bring the awesomeness of both. Who wants a boring ass cookie when you can bring some heat with the sweet….and throw in a little saltyness too. It is also worth noting that adding spicy heat to a cookie increases the cookie’s badass factor tenfold and that makes you a badass for making them. I am into really hot stuff and originally made these with ground dried scorpion peppers. I tried to share them with people and most were too intimidated to try it and some friends got a little angry when I forgot to mention the the hotness, so here we are with the civilian version but feel free to take it back up a notch if you are feeling brave.

Here’s what you will need: Oven Temp 350 degrees F

1 1/4 cups brown sugar

3/4 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 cup and 1 tablespoon unsalted butter (that’s 2 sticks and an extra tablespoon)

Emotional fortitude

1 cup cocoa powder

2 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons cayenne powder (this is adjustable according to your heat tolerance or the amount of pain you wish to inflict on your enemies)

1/2 teaspoon table salt

1 bag of chocolate chips (I prefer milk chocolate but use what ya like)

11 oz. bag of caramels

Confidence

1 1/2 tablespoons milk

Sea salt in a grinder

Parchment paper

regular kitchen stuff like pans, an oven, a spoon, bowls and a couple hours free time

Step 1: Reminiscing on your college days

The first thing to do is melt the butter. Most cookies recipes will advise you to only soften the butter rather than melt it. This is because melted butter is hot (go figure) and can actually start to cook the eggs when mixing and that just throws a wrench into everything. So why are we melting the butter you ask? Don’t worry we are gonna let it cool before we mix it in with the eggs.

Remember back in college when you made “that brownie recipe” and you had to melt the butter with the “herbs” so the chemicals could bond with the butter. This is similar to that. Capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers taste hot, dissolves in and bonds with fat and oil rather than water. This is why drinking water after a spicy food doesn’t really help because it just sloshes the hot stuff around to other parts of your mouth just spreading the heat. If you drink something like milk, which has fat, it absorbs the capsaicin and it goes down with the milk when you swallow taking some of the heat along with it. So this is why we are melting the butter with the cayenne. It will absorb some of the capsaicin and spread it more evenly through the cookies.

Chop up the butter and add it to a sauce pan on low heat. “Slow and low is the way to go” when melting butter. You’ll never forget that. You can thank me later.

‘

Once good and melted throw in the cayenne and begin to stir

Let it simmer a while on the lowest heat setting and continue to stir until it looks about like this.

Now take off heat and let it cool while you move to step 2

Step 2: The dry stuff

Put 2 cups flour, 1 cup cocoa, 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1/2 teaspoon table salt and put it in a bowl and whisk it together until it is well blended. Set it aside. This is as far as we can go until the butter cools.

Step 3:

Once the butter is cooled down to room temperature it’s time to mix it in with the sugars and eggs. Mix butter, 2 eggs and brown and white sugars until well blended and looks creamy.

starting to look like cookie dough

Spicy food pro tip: When eating or cooking with spicy stuff keep your hands away from your face. Any spice as hot as cayenne or hotter is super irritating and can burn your eyes and nose. This next part is super important so get ready to store it in the long term memory: Wash your hands BEFORE you use the restroom. You don’t want any hot pepper residue anywhere near your junk….trust me. back to the recipe….

Step 4: Preheat

Preheat oven to 350. simple enough

Step 5: Cookie dough

I used a stand mixer for this next part but it can done by hand by those with patience, will power and high tolerance for frustration. Add the dry stuff to the wet stuff in small scoops as you mix. Add a little dry stuff mix and repeat until it looks like this and is smooth.

Add the chocolate chips by folding them into the dough with a spoon. If you can make it to this point without tasting some then you are obviously some sort of freak of nature with superhuman restraint and willpower and my hat is off to you.

Step 6: Balls

Cover your favorite cookie pan with some parchment paper. Parchment paper is your friend when making cookies. Use a spoon to scoop out the cookie dough and form it into balls. The ball shape is important because it will keep the cookie from spreading out to much while cooking and they will be more moist when done.

Make sure to leave enough space for them to spread out and not get all up in each other’s space.

Step 7: Into the oven

Once your oven hits 350 put the cookies on the middle rack and set your timer for 10 minutes. They will probably take about 12 minutes but around 10 minutes is a good time to start checking on them. We have put in too much work at this point to get careless and go burning the cookies. You can use a toothpick or fork and when you can insert it in to a cookie and it comes out mostly clean then you are good to take them out. They should look something like this.

Step 8: Caramelt (caramel + melt)

Open your bag of caramels and drop them all into a sauce pan with 1.5 tablespoons milk.

Once again slow and low until it will fall from a spoon smoothly like this

.

Step 9: The Driz

Get the line up and use a spoon to drizzle the caramel over the cookies. Then use the sea salt grinder to give a a dusting of the salt and if you are brave give an additional dusting of cayenne. Maybe use some unground sea salt to give some texture.