Cinema snacks: recreating recipes from the silver screen
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Welcome to our series ‘Snack to the Future’, where we show you how to recreate snack-sized recipes from the screen, so you can munch your way through the movies, along with your favourite characters.
This year, the classic coming-of-age comedy CLUELESS turns a staggering 30 years old. This may come as quite a shock because somehow, Paul Rudd looks exactly the same but, it has in fact been a gobsmacking three decades since Cher Horowitz taught us that life isn't worth living unless your enrobed in Alaïa. What the heck is Paul Rudd's secret, I hear you cry?! (Well, I'm hardly going to say it's not the cookies...)
In this recipe, we brown the butter, and then cool our beurre noisette back down to room temp before continuing with our bake. This does add a little extra time, so you could simplify things and skip this step but, browning the butter adds a lovely nuttiness and depth of flavour, so we think it's worth doing to really ramp things up.
**We call for chilling in the fridge for a minimum of 45 minutes before baking, which allows the flour in the dough to fully absorb the moisture. Hydrating the dough like this results in a chewier cookie, which we prefer to it's cakey cousin. Making sure the dough is really cold before it goes in the oven also prevents spread, so you end up with thicker, taller cookies, but, this is all just personal preference and here at Bite Club, we don't judge your choices. Do you prefer fashion victim, or ensembly challenged?
A combo of dark and milk chocolate is totes fashionable and gives you that perfect balance of sweet/creamy and nutty/bitter. *We prefer to use a bar chopped up into chunks, rather than using chocolate chips (ugh, as if!) Chips are just too small to give you those molten pools of decadence and, let's be honest, the chocolate is usually a bit... what's the word... crap. To get the best cookies, you want to use the best chocolate you can get your hands on.
We all know that whenever a boy (or girl) comes over, you should always have something baking, and these simple but DELICIOUS cookies will be sure to impress. Just make sure you keep an eye on them, cookies always take less time to bake than you think, so be careful not to pull a Cher and burn them, she really is Clueless.
Ready, set, BAKE 🍪
CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
Features at 59 mins & 5 seconds of Clueless
INGREDIENTS (makes 12)
220g Plain flour
150g Unsalted butter
1 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
1 large egg + 1 egg yolk
80g Dark chocolate *bar, not chips
80g Milk chocolate *bar, not chips
70g Dark Brown Sugar
50g Caster sugar
1 tsp Vanilla extract
¼ tsp Kosher salt
Sprinkle of flaky salt to finish (optional)
Ice (for chilling the browned butter)
METHOD
Pre-heat the oven to 200°C / 180°C fan.
Melt the butter in a small saucepan on a medium heat. Bring to a simmer, for approx 5 minutes until the white flecks (milk solids) at the bottom of the pan turn dark brown.
Fill the bottom of a large bowl with ice, then place a smaller bowl inside. Pour the browned butter into the smaller bowl, and stir continuously, scraping down the sides, for around 3-4 mins, until the butter reduces temperature and solidifies (resembling room temp, beaten butter). Discard the ice.
Add the dark brown sugar and the caster sugar to the butter, and fold to combine. (Avoid whipping, and adding excess air, as this will result in a cakey cookie).
Add the 1 egg + 1 egg yolk, kosher salt and vanilla extract to the butter mixture and mix together until fully incorporated.
Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into the mixture and fold until combined.
Chop the chocolate bars into chunks. Reserve about a third of the chocolate for topping, and fold the remaining chocolate into the dough.
Portion the dough into twelve (approx 2.5 tbsp of dough per cookie), roll into balls, and place onto a lined baking sheet.
Make sure you leave at least two inches between each ball to allow space for them to spread without merging into one giant cookie sheet (though that sounds pretty good actually).
Top each cookie with the reserved chocolate, to ensure you have perfect visible chunks on each one.
Cover loosely with cling film and chill in the fridge for 45 minutes**
Bake the cookies for 10-12 mins until they just begin to colour on the edges. The cookies will set up as they cool, so they should still be very soft at this stage.
Leave the cookies to cool and firm up on the baking tray(s) for at least 10 mins before you attempt to move them. Optionally, sprinkle each cookie with a little flaky sea salt. (Maldon is obvs our fave!)
Transfer to a wire rack and leave to cool before serving; patience is (supposedly) a virtue.
