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Café-Style Chocolate Chip Cookies

Café-Style Chocolate Chip Cookies

golden brown and glossy, thick and gooey in the center, and caramelized and crunchy underneath

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Nea Arentzen
Feb 26, 2025
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Nea Arentzen
Nea Arentzen
Café-Style Chocolate Chip Cookies
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Chocolate chip cookies are one of my favorites, and while I'll eat almost any kind, I’ve finally come to a recipe that replicates my ideal café-style cookie. These cookies are thick, deeply golden brown, and mostly underbaked in the center—so when they cool, the inside tastes like chilled, caramel-like cookie dough. This recipe is also made with half regular brown sugar, and half turbinado sugar, which adds a really nice yet subtle crunch (read more about that below).

A key step in this recipe is cooking the butter and sugars together before mixing them with the dry ingredients. This caramelizes the sugars slightly, creating a richer flavor and leaving you with a beautifully crisp, caramelized bottom. Additionally, when sugar is well-dissolved in the dough (especially from melted butter or cooking the butter and sugar together), it can create a smoother, shinier surface as the cookies bake, which was one of my goals for this recipe.

Although I usually prefer a recipe with minimal waiting time (technically, you could bake these right away), chilling the dough makes the biggest difference. Letting it cool until fully solidified prevents excessive spreading and ensures a perfectly thick, chewy cookie with just the right texture.

chocolate chip cookie with flakey sea salt on a white plate

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