Chocolate-Caramel Thumbprints

Chocolate-Caramel Thumbprints

1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tbsp milk
1 tsp vanilla
16 vanilla caramels, unwrapped
3 Tbsp whipping cream
1 1/4 cup finely chopped pecans
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate pieces
1 tsp shortening

1. Separate egg; place yolk and white in separate bowls. Cover and chill egg white until needed. In a medium bowl stir together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt; set aside.
2. In a large mixing bowl beat butter with an electric mixer on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar. Beat until combined, scraping sides of bowl occasionally. Beat in egg yolk, milk, and vanilla until combined. Beat in the flour mixture. Cover and chill dough 2 hours or until easy to handle.
3. Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a cookie sheet; set aside. In a small saucepan heat and stir caramels and whipping cream over low heat until smooth. Set aside.
4. Lightly beat reserved egg white. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll balls in egg white, then in pecans to coat. Place balls 1 inch apart on the prepared cookie sheet. Using your thumb, make an indentation in the center of each cookie.
5. Bake 10 minutes or until edges are firm. Spoon melted caramel mixture into cookie centers. (If necessary, reheat caramel mixture to keep it spoonable.) Transfer to a wire rack and let cool.
6. In another small saucepan heat and stir chocolate pieces and shortening over low heat until smooth. Let cool slightly. Drizzle chocolate mixture over tops of cookies. Let stand until set.

Makes 3 dozen.

This is yet another recipe out of The Ultimate Cookie Book from Better Homes and Gardens. I adore caramel in just about anything so I was so excited about these cookies and their pool of caramel.

The ingredients:

It's hard to believe but I had never separated an egg before this. I had seen it done a few times but this was my first time to do it myself. Here are the two halves of the egg.

This is also the first time I remember using milk in a cookie recipe. It made the dough's consistency just a little bit different than anything I'd seen before.

Here is the finished dough right before I covered it and stuck in the refrigerator. It smelled really chocolaty.

As I mentioned before, I love caramel. I like it in drinks, ice cream, and just about any dessert. Here are the allotted 16 caramels. I promise I only ate one caramel (although I definitely could have eaten most of the package).

They have you begin the caramel sauce just as you start working with the dough. I thought that might be a little long but I was wrong. It took a really long time for the caramels to melt into the cream. I was actually wondering if it would get done by the time the cookies did but it worked out in the end.

I'm not the greatest at eyeballing measurements. Every time I try I end up with either way too many cookies or these behemoth cookies that don't bake right. I rolled up all 36 at once that way I knew they were the right size.

The rolling was pretty messy. The dough wasn't super sticky like some and was denser in consistency than a normal dough. It was kind of like rolling up balls of fudge.

Here is a batch right before I popped it in the oven.

I ran out of pecans before I could coat the last six cookies. I guess I was a little overzealous in the coating of the first few. That meant that there were 3 cookies that were partially coated and 3 that had no pecans at all. My husband isn't a huge fan of nuts in general so I was okay with trying a few without any pecans. It turned out that the ones without pecans were pretty good as well.

The indentation from the thumbprint bakes up a little but still leaves a nice well for the caramel.

I almost forgot to take a picture of the finished caramel sauce. It was really nice to work with because it was fluid enough to drizzle but it sets up really solid.

The sauce smoothed out nicely into a shiny pool of caramel on each cookie.

The chocolate drizzling sauce is fairly standard. I couldn't get it to set up though. They looked and tasted fine but the chocolate didn't seem to resolidify.

The final product: these cookies are incredible. They are chewy, caramelly and all sorts of delicious. When they are fresh out of the oven , the pecans are the perfect crunchy complement to the moistness of the cookie and the gooeyness of the caramel and chocolate. The next day the cookies take on much more flavor of the pecans and remind me a lot more of a chocolate turtle. When I make these again (if I plan on them making it out of my kitchen), I will try switching the chocolate pieces out for chocolate candy coating to make them more conducive to stacking.