Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops

Picasso had his blue period. Woody Allen had his Scarlett Johansson period. And we Tuesdays with Dorie bakers, we are in the midst of our great Cookie Period. Last week we did Chunkariffic Peanutty Buttery Oatey Chocolatey Cookie-y Chubbers (or whatever they were called) and this week we have Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops. No boring cookies for us, no sir.

The dough for these cookies has cocoa powder and malted milk powder (I used chocolate-flavored malted milk) and the cookies are studded with chopped malted milk balls--aka Whoppers--and chocolate chips.

I'd never baked with Whoppers before (go figure) and wasn't quite sure what to expect. Turns out I'm not a huge fan. Malted milk balls aren't on the top of my favorite candy list anyhow, but once they're baked, they lose their crunchy texture and become more chewy, with a stick-in-your-teeth quality that I didn't like. Which is unfortunate, because I really loved the dough. It had a deep, rich quality to it, like eating a mug of hot chocolate, and it stayed beautifully soft and tender for days. I would definitely keep the dough recipe, but omit the Whoppers next time.

That being said, a strange thing happened to me after I baked these cookies. I brought them to a family gathering and munched on them over the course of a long weekend. I don't know if they really changed texture, or if I came down with some sort of cookie-related Stockholm Syndrome, but I ended up really liking these by the end! The chewy Whoppers seemed to lose some of their stickiness, and the cookie became more uniform in texture. Four days after baking them, I liked them significantly more than when they were fresh out of the oven.

What did my fellow Dorites and Doritos think? Did you enjoy the Whopper experience?