Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies

I know I’m late to the party with this one (the party being the “put tahini into your desserts” party) but I’ve also not been blogging for two years, so cut me some slack!

The truth is, during my blogging hiatus, I was much more likely to make recipes that I’d already made before than to try new ones. That was part of the relief of not blogging: there wasn’t this sense of, “I’ve got to feed the beast.” (Sorry for calling you a beast.) But now that I’m back in the saddle, I find myself thinking of you, my beautiful beast; and so when I had friends coming over for dinner the other night, I decided not to make my usual chocolate chip cookies. I decided to make the kind with tahini.

The recipe I turned to was this one by Julia Moskin. The tahini I turned to was the one Michael Solomonov recommends in his Zahav cookbook: Soom (which you can buy on Amazon).

There’s really not much to this recipe: you beat your butter the way you normally would, only you add tahini to the mix. Sugar, vanilla, eggs, you know the drill. At the end, you add lots of chopped chocolate (I may have added more than the recipe suggested; sue me).

The nice thing is, the dough has to rest, so it’s a good thing to make the night before a dinner party (which is what I did). Here’s the dough pre-refrigerator:

The next night, as I fed chicken to my friends Eric, Sean, and Tim (who you may recognize from the New York post… his new book, Life Is Like A Musical, comes out this week!), I let the cookie dough come to room temperature out of the fridge, to make it easier to scoop. (I also pre-heated the oven to 325. Why am I saying this in parentheses?)

So after the chicken was et, into the kitchen I went to go a’scoopin’:

Then into the oven they went and I let them go until they were nice and brown all over, even though the recipe is pretty strict about taking them out while they’re still pale in the middle.

So what’s the verdict?

The verdict is: GUILTY OF BEING AMAZING!

Seriously, the tahini adds so much flavor. That’s basically the best way to describe it: cookie-wise, because they were warm out of the oven, they were gooey and soft and oh-so-good. But then the tahini flavor kicks in, and you get this deep, nutty, toasted quality that’s pretty transcendent. Yeah I used the word “transcendnet.” But I couldn’t spell it the second time.

So the moral of the story is… because you guys exist, I made cookies with tahini in them, and my life is better because of it. So thank you.

[Once again: the link to the recipe.]