Sunny Cookies for a Rainy Day

What’s cooking? Caramel-and-Potato Chip Cookies

It’s a gray day here in Jersey City. Only a couple of days past Labor Day, and it’s as if Mother Nature said to herself, “Well. That’s enough of summer.”  Overcast and intermittent drizzle all the day long. For those of us in the every-day-is-Saturday category, that makes it a great day for reading, relaxing, and indulging a bit.

I have just the thing for that indulgence, too. These cookies. And even though Labor Day is over, the gray days are not, so you might just have one any old time. I made the cookies on Saturday, as the finale to a dinner on the patio of our condo building. Turns out, the building has a couple of grills you can reserve – for an hour at a time – as well as the requisite tools. What a happy surprise for the Kitchen Goddess! Of course, I learned of this perk way too late in the season to make really good use of it, but now that it’s on my radar, next summer will be a whole new experience for my prince, who is the grillmeister.

Before we got married, he and I had both been living on our own. But once we’d tied the knot, we realized – okay, I realized – that with both of us working full-time, we needed a methodology for distributing domestic labor, if you know what I mean. So I developed a system based on the categories of inside vs outside. Inside was my domain; outside was his. So... cooking inside was my job; cooking outside was his. Garbage inside was my problem, but once it got to the kitchen door, it became his. Cars inside the house were my issue; cars outside were his. I took care of snow removal inside; he took care of it outside. You got the idea?

Which is how my hubby ended up as the grillmeister. And on Saturday, he and my older son grilled a delicious salmon fillet. (I’ll be posting it, but didn’t get around to the photos this time.) We served it with a sugar snap pea salad with buttermilk dressing (another dynamite recipe to come) and sweet potato fries. Dessert was vanilla ice cream and these cookies. What a combo: salty, sweet cookies with creamy, cold vanilla... whew! Even the grandchildren were impressed.

Caramel-and-Potato Chip Cookies

Adapted from The Vintage Baker (May 2018) , by Jessie Sheehan, as shown at epicurious.com

I don’t think I’d heard of the concept of including potato chips in a sweet dish, but with the caramel flavoring, it was a salted caramel treat in a form you could eat with your hands. Mmmm... The original recipe called for butterscotch chips, and you should feel free to use them instead of the caramel sauce. But I hit two grocery stores, and caramel sauce was the closest I could find. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t make a big difference.

To compensate for the difference between caramel (made with white sugar) and butterscotch (made with dark brown sugar), I substituted dark brown sugar for the original’s light brown sugar. Then I liked the results so much, I think I’ll just keep making them this way. You, of course, can make your own choice. I expect my dough was a bit more moist than the ones with butterscotch chips, but they baked up just fine, as you can see. And the caramel version might even produce a chewier, more evenly flavored cookie.

Makes 3 dozen cookies.

Ingredients

2½ cups [325 grams] all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
½ cup (180 grams) caramel sauce
Two 5-ounce bags (5-6 cups) kettle-style potato chips

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350°. Line two rimmed half-sheet baking pans with parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, use a fork to stir together the flour, baking soda, and salt. (Or sift them together into the bowl. Either way, the goal is to aerate the flour.) Set the dry ingredients aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugars on medium-high speed until thick, light, and glossy, 3 to 5 minutes, scraping the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed.

Reduce the mixer speed to medium-low and add the egg and yolk, one at a time, beating well and scraping the bowl after each addition. Add the vanilla and caramel sauce, mixing well to combine.

Add the dry ingredients all at once, stirring carefully by hand to get the dry ingredients lightly moistened. (This is a large batch of dough, so if you turn the mixer on before getting the wet mixture at least sort of combined with the dry, you can end up with flour all over the place. Trust the Kitchen Goddess on this point.)

Take a minute to crush the potato chips. The Kitchen Goddess prefers to do that in the chip bag, cutting a small hole in the top of the bag to release the air inside. She then uses a glass measuring cup or a large-bottomed drinking glass or even a rolling pin to turn the chips into tiny pieces – most less than ½ inch square.

Once the dough is evenly mixed, add 3 cups (about 105 grams) of the potato chips to the dough, and run the mixer on low to combine well.

Pour the remaining crushed chips into a small bowl. Using a cookie scoop or measuring spoon, scoop the dough into blobs (the original recipe calls them balls, but only someone with a very loose definition of balls would find that term acceptable) equal to 1½ tablespoons, then roll each blob in the bowl of leftover crushed chips. Place the chip-encrusted blobs onto one of the prepared baking sheets. The cookies will spread, so don’t try to manage more than 12 to a sheet.

Photo alert: This is fake news -- I wanted to show you how large the cookies are so you don't try
to fit more than 12 on a half-sheet. So these didn't just come out of the oven, ok?

Bake 10-12 minutes, rotating at the halfway point, until lightly browned. Remove the pan from the oven and, using a large spatula, press gently down on each cookie to slightly flatten them. Let the cookies cool for 5 minutes in the pan, then move them to a baking rack to firm up.

The Kitchen Goddess recommends filling one pan with dough blobs, then filling the second while the first is baking. That way, the first pan is then available for the final 12 blobs while the second pan is in the oven.

These cookies are swoon-worthy while they’re still warm, but still delicious – and reasonably moist – if kept in an airtight container on the counter for up to 3 days.

Kitchen Goddess note on using butterscotch chips instead of caramel sauce: If you like butterscotch better than caramel – or just want to try the other version – you’ll need to make the following adjustments:
● Use 1 cup (180 grams) butterscotch chips, and stir them into the dry ingredients at the beginning.
● Use light brown sugar instead of dark.
● Watch the baking time. The caramel sauce version – because it is so moist – needed to bake for about 12 minutes total. The butterscotch chip version will likely only need 9-10 minutes.