Chewy Chunky Salted Caramel Choc Chip Cookies

I had a craving that needed to be scratched. I wanted a chewy chocolate chip cookie. But not just any chocolate chip cookie-a chunky one with dark chocolate salted caramel and sesame seeds. Enter these 5C cookies - chewy, chunky, caramel, chocolate chip cookies!

These chocolate chip cookies came from a daydream. I'm actually more of a hard or crisp cookie sort of gal but chewy works for this cookie because of the texture of the salted caramel once it's cooked.

I was curious to see what would happen if you baked a gooey centered chocolate bar in a cookie and it works! The caramel caramelises and thickens further and you get these lovely chewy toffee texture. The sesame lends it that extra flavour which I was very fond of. Honestly it's hard for me to do basics when you have a love for the dramatic.

You may also notice that not all cookies look the same. I tried these with a block chocolate licorice because I was making these for Mr NQN too.

The secret to chewy cookies over crunchy cookies is to increase the moisture content of the cookie. To do this you use higher moisture ingredients like brown sugar (which feels a bit like damp sand), butter (which has milk solids and water-check out the label to see how much water butter contains!) and egg - the yolks have a lot of moisture in them. Melting the butter also makes for chewier cookies instead of creaming the butter and sugar together. Also baking them for 16 minutes instead of 20 minutes keeps them slightly gooey in the centre.

How to control your cookies spreading: Chilling your dough helps with this and isn't optional in this recipe. The butter content means that these cookies will spread because the melting point of butter is low so they will start to spread quickly. Chilling the dough overnight helps to avoid too much spread.

Options: The possibilities are endless and can involve your favourite block of chocolate or chocolate bar. I was curious to see if you could bake a soft, gooey centered caramel chocolate bar so that's why I baked these.

Speaking of cookies, I've always wanted to try Girl Scout Cookies. As an avid consumer of American television during my childhood Girl Scout cookies featured heavily. Ivy is part of an American expat group on Facebook and she said that they were shipping over a whole lot of these and she asked did I want in on them? I answered back "YES!" as fast as my chubby fingers could type (okay my fingers aren't chubby but they are chubby in spirit).

They arrived a few months later and the timing could not have been better. We were in week 3 of our self imposed hibernation and I was going a bit crazy (see ladybird story).

"Guess what I've got?" Ivy messaged. She had boxes of those cookies in her hot little hands! I made a time to go pick them up the next day and let her know that I was on my way. When I arrived at her apartment block I let her know that I was downstairs. We were doing a contactless drop but I wasn't sure which gate she was going to appear from so I waited in the car.

"Look up," came the message.

I looked up and there was Ivy, on her third floor apartment lowering down a bucket on a string containing four boxes of girl scout cookies and a giant sunflower! Talk about clever!

I couldn't stop laughing, even the people jogging past couldn't resist cracking a smile. We had a brief chat before my neck started hurting too much from squinting up at her and then I took my exciting bounty home. Stay tuned for my own version of my favourite Girl Scout Cookies and in the meantime I hope you'll give these cookies a try!

So tell me Dear Reader, what is the chocolate bar that you would add to this cookie?

Chewy Chunky Salted Caramel Choc Chip Cookies

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

Preparation time: 30 minutes plus overnight chilling

Cooking time: 16 minutes per tray

Makes around 20 cookies

• 2 cups/250g/8.8ozs. plain all purpose flour
• 1 1/4 teaspoons fine salt (use 1/2 teaspoon if not making salted caramel cookies)
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarb of soda
• 170g/6ozs. butter, melted
• 1 cup/155g/5.5ozs. brown sugar
• 1/2 cup/110g/3.9ozs. caster or superfine sugar
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract or paste
• 1 large egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 250g/8.8ozs. Salted Caramel chocolate block (I used a Whittakers 62% Salted Caramel dark chocolate block)
• 1/4 cup/40g/1.4ozs. sesame seeds

Step 1 - Whisk the flour, salt and bicarb together in a jug. In a large bowl whisk the butter, both sugars, vanilla, egg and egg yolk until no lumps remain. Add the butter mix to the flour and mix until well incorporated. Place this cookie dough in the fridge overnight.

Step 2 - The next day take the cookie dough out of the fridge 30 minutes before you want to bake them. Preheat oven to 160C/320F and line 2-3 trays with parchment.

Step 3 - Roll walnut sized balls of dough and add two chunks of the chocolate per ball. If you're rolling it in sesame seeds roll them into balls and then roll in the sesame seeds. Place six balls of dough per cookie sheet as they spread a lot. Bake for 15-16 minutes. The bottoms may have a soft caramel finish to them so use a cake lifter to lift them off the parchment.