Masterful Cookie Recipe for Crispy Edges and Chewy Centers

My recipe for baking crispy cookies with gooey chewy chocolatey middles.

easy cookie recipes, desserts, and baking fun things

Joanne Adirim

Founder & Executive Pastry Chef

FEB 24, 2022

For 25 years, Joanne has served as the Founder and Executive Pastry Chef at Hannahmax Baking. Known for her best in class reputation, Joanne and her baking company have crafted gourmet desserts for fine dining establishments, coffee cafes, hotels, & grocery companies across North America. In 2022, she launched the Cookie Chips® Baking Mix, a cookie mix that's shaking up home baking with its bakery quality results. In From The Pastry Kitchen, she shares her industry earned expertise with the home baking community.

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In the cookie world, and among serious cookie bakers, you often hear the question asked, how do you get crispy edges with gooey chewy chocolatey centers?

As a pastry chef, I spend a lot of my time testing and creating new products. This has been a full time love of mine for over 25 years. I’m constantly looking for new ingredients and reinventing tried and true ingredients. Testing textures, reviewing and testing other professional recipes, and developing new baking concepts and trends. All with only the best of the best ingredients that are not loaded with the typical junk that who knows what they mean, without researching it on the internet. Yikes.

A Note on How to Make Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies.

This article is intended for bakers who are already familiar with how to bake chocolate chip cookies and how to make chewy chocolate chip cookies. If you need a review of the basics, please review How to Bake Cookie Chips® and my blog article A Professional Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.

Launching Cookie Chips®, a ready to eat thin snacking cookie, as a home baked good was an awesome idea that came as a result of this awful pandemic that we are all (still) dealing with.

The only good thing about this pandemic, for me anyways, is I moved with my family to a beautiful new location in South Florida. Clean air, clean streets, and beautiful ocean. Geez. Can you guess where I moved from? Besides the move, the pandemic created a whole new world of at-home baker’s. That's totally cool.

With Cookie Chips as a home baking mix, I bake these cookies in my own home kitchen. While they are awesome as thin, crunchy snacking cookies, with a few recipe tweaks, the mix makes amazing thick and chewy, crispy edges chocolate chip cookies. And yes, they have the melty gooey, soft cookie center that you are looking for.

Just a little bit of flour, a touch of sugar, and baking powder, and you will have guaranteed results. The fun part is adding in whatever chocolate you love to eat. A combo of big chips and chunks or chopped chocolate bars is, in my humble chocolate opinion, the best.

If you’re a chocolate snob, add in some Valrhona feves, Callebaut, or Cacao Barry brands of chocolate. These are awesome professional choices. You can add the feves whole, or chop them a little bit.

What are chocolate feves?

"Chocolate feves are elegant alternatives to chocolate chips. They're made in an oval disc shape with an indented middle. Chocolate feves can be used as a substitute for almost any chocolate chip recipe. They can also easily be melted down and used to create chocolate ganache or used as a chocolate coating."

Source: https://www.worldwidechocolate.com/shop-by-brand/valrhona/chocolate-feves/

Do add one or two feves on top of your cookie before you bake for that beautiful melty chocolate appearance. Oh, and yes, you can buy Valrhona Chocolate Feves on Amazon. Valrhona also sells home sized packaging on their website. Amazing.

I also found a great selection of chocolates at Whole Foods The brand Tony’s Chocolonely has some nice chocolate bars that are easy to chop and add in. I particularly enjoyed their dark milk chocolate. I don’t want my milk chocolate overly sweet and they hit the flavor profile nicely. Whole Foods also has loads of other quality chocolate bar choices, as well as chips from quality manufacturers such as Guittard. And, Guittard is also another great professional chocolate choice.

So, here’s what I found in playing with my Cookie Chips® mix. After tweaking the recipe to make the dough, I scooped balls of dough and refrigerated them overnight. The next day, I took them out, loaded them on my parchment lined sheet pan, and let them come to room temperature.

Then, I lightly pressed down on top, and baked them at 325 F. I use convection mode because I can. If you can, you should too. If not, no biggie. You may need to bake them at 350 F if you don’t use convection. It’s kind of a trial and error process.

Once the cookies were baked, the edges were golden brown and the middle was still light, I removed them and dropped the pan on the counter. You know the pan banging technique from Sarah Kieffer? This is a great technique to try. It drops the middle of the cookie and the edges give you that wrinkled effect.

That’s it. Grab you cookie mixes available on our website and follow along for the best chewy chocolate chip cookies recipe ever.

Let's get baking!