Saucer Sized Chocolate Chip Cookies

Forget standard chocolate chips. These oversized cookies use three different milk chocolate bars melted together, chilled until hard, then smashed with a hammer into irregular, pea-sized chunks. Those hand-chopped chocolate pieces melt unevenly during baking, creating pools of gooey chocolate alongside chunks that hold their shape. It’s a completely different experience from uniform chips.

Each cookie uses a full third of your dough batch, flattened into a 3 ½ to 4 inch round before baking. At this size, the timing is everything. Pull them at 16 minutes even though they’ll look almost undone in the center. That’s the point. The cookies continue baking on the hot sheet as they cool, and that carryover cooking is what gives you a golden, slightly crispy edge with a soft, almost gooey middle.

Overbake these by even two minutes and they turn rock-hard once cooled. Trust the process, pull them when they look underdone, and let them rest on the pan.

Pro Tips

• Chill the melted chocolate in the pie pan until completely hard before smashing. Soft chocolate won’t break into pieces
• Keep the chocolate chunks refrigerated until you fold them into the dough. Warm chunks melt into the dough and disappear
• Use your favorite cookie dough recipe. This technique works with any base recipe
• Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for at least 5 minutes before moving. They’re extremely fragile when hot

Variations

• Dark chocolate version: Use bittersweet or semisweet bars instead of milk chocolate for a more intense, less sweet cookie
• Mixed chocolate: Combine milk, dark, and white chocolate bars for a triple-chocolate chunk cookie
• Sea salt finish: Sprinkle flaky sea salt on top of each cookie right after pulling from the oven