I’ve become a little bit obsessed with chocolate pretzels lately. I reviewed this M&S version, made these cookies, and I’ve been fantasizing about these chocolate pretzel cupcakes and chocolate chip pretzel bars a little too much, frankly!
I googled ‘chocolate cookies’ (does anyone else find themselves using google to search for recipes even though they have stacks and stacks of cookbooks on their shelves? Sometimes I even find and make recipes that I have in my cookbooks!) and this Nigella recipe for totally chocolate cookies popped up. Perfect! I jigged with the quantities a bit, taking out some of the chocolate chips and replacing them with broken up pretzels!
- 100g dark or plain chocolate, melted in the microwave
- 150g flour
- 30g cocoa, sieved
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 125g soft butter
- 75g light brown sugar
- 50g white sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 egg
- 150g dark chocolate chips (I used plain chocolate cut into large chunks)
- 200g broken up pretzels. I broke them up by hand and used Tesco pretzels, the M&S ones are very nice too!
You’ll need to preheat your oven to 150 degrees / gas mark 5 if you’re planning on baking the cookies right away.
First, cream the soft butter with the light brown and caster sugar.
Add vanilla extract, the egg, chocolate chunks, pretzel bits and melted chocolate.
Then sift in your plain flour and cocoa powder and also add the bicarb of soda and salt.
It should all come together in a fairly stiff dough. At this point, you can use a spoon or your hands to pinch off walnut-sized pieces of the dough, roll into a rough ball and then pop onto a baking tray. Or if you prefer to eat some or all of the cookies later, turn the dough out onto some clingfilm, and mould it into a log shape (or something similar!). Then you can cover with clingfilm and leave in the fridge or freezer until you’re ready to cook. When you are, just use a sharp serrated knife to slice off cookies from the log.
Cook for 10-15 minutes at 150 degrees/gas mark 5. Check them after about 7-8 minutes, and I always rotate cookies from the top and middle shelves of my oven so that none of them get too browned.
Enjoy!
x Kerry
On reflection I think I didn’t break my pretzels small enough, so the cookies were quite big and didn’t have enough contiguous dough around the pretzel pieces. They also didn’t really flatten out when they were baking (possibly because of the above) so I squashed them down half way through.
I left them in the oven a little longer due to my paranoia after all of the above, but I don’t think that was necessary. It left them quite crunchy and I would have preferred more of a chew to the cookie itself.
Nonetheless they were very popular with my colleagues! And I learned some good lessons for next time.
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I LOVE that you’ve used the word contiguous in your comment Sarah! Amazing!
I’ve actually been craving those salty chocolate covered pretzels since you mentioned them in a post the other day. Why did they stop selling them in the UK?! I’m really hoping they do them in American when I visit. (I should probably just try making them too!)
These look yummy
The lack of flipz in the UK market is a definate crime. M&S have started selling some but they’re just not the same. I suggest a chocolate fondue (dairy milk of course) session with marshmallows, fruit, and lots of pretzels to satisfy your craving!
Sounds like a sound prescription to me!
These look super yummy! I love the idea of forming it into a cookie log for later! May have to steal that tip haha! Great post!
It works really well if you just want to make a few cookies. You could make say 9 cookies and then do 3 little logs that would also make 9 cookies and freeze them wrapped up individually. Relatedly – frozen cookie dough tastes delicious on a warm day!
I am not a fan of pretzels to be honest- but this actually sounds like a good idea to me! I am going to try it sometime 🙂
Thanks Meg 🙂 They were interesting (in a good way!) – it was a new texture experience and the salt definitely came through
oh that looks goooood!!!
thanks Jimmie!