Rolo Fudge Cookies

Rolo Fudge Cookies - made October 19, 2013 from Roxana's Home Baking

Around this time of year is usually when I'm making things that use up Halloween candy.  Either what you fish out of your kids' Halloween spoils or what you can buy on sale post-October 31.  If you've got some extra Rolos hanging around after tonight's candy gathering, here's one use for them: make a chocolate cookie dough and wrap it around a Rolo.  Then bake into a caramel fudge cookie.

With the ingredients in this recipe, i.e. a relatively high amount of chocolate chips and a low amount of flour, I expected the dough for this would be soft. Since the chocolate comes from chocolate chips, it stands to reason that after it melts and cools, it'll set close to its original solid form, even with the addition of butter, sugar and eggs.  So I wasn't too concerned after I mixed the ingredients that the dough was more like a batter.  I chilled it briefly but I was a little short on time so I probably made the dough balls a little too soon.  The dough was still really soft so it was a little hard to handle neatly and wrap around a Rolo.

My original plan was to form the dough around one Rolo per cookie and in an ideal cookie-baking world, the chocolate cookie wouldn't flatten too much and the Rolo would remain perfectly in the middle so when you bit into it, there would be free-flowing caramel amidst a fudgy cookie.  In the real world, because the dough was still too soft when I incorporated the Rolos into it, in some cookies, the Rolos were really off-center once the cookies baked.  Fortunately, the taste was still the same.  The cookies did flatten a little more than I wanted but they had a good fudgy texture and flavor.

If you read the original recipe below, you'll notice it calls for using chopped up Rolos and caramels and simply adding them to the finished batter then scooping them out.  No need to do any wrapping around whole Rolos.  That would probably be the easier and better way to go.

8 oz (224 grams) chocolate chips
3 tbsp (42 grams) butter
1/2 cup (100 grams) brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup (40 grams) all purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1 cup chopped rolos and caramels (I just used the regular-size whole Rolos but minis or chopped Rolos might've been better)

1. Heat the oven to 350F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. In a microwave safe bowl add the chocolate chips and butter and heat until melted (about 1 minutes) stirring to combined and smooth. You can also melt the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water.
3. In a mixing bowl beat the eggs and sugar until start to thicken and they have a pale color.
4. With the paddle attachment on, at low-to-medium speed, pour the melted chocolate over the sweetened eggs. It's important to keep mixing while you add the chocolate to prevent the eggs from cooking. Add vanilla extract and mix.
5. Add the flour, baking powder and salt. Stir until combined.
6. With a spatula, fold in the chocolate caramels.
7. Chill the dough for 1 hour or until hard enough to handle.
8. With a small scoop, place balls of cookie dough on the prepared baking sheets.
9. Bake in preheated oven for about 11 minutes.
10. Let cool for about 10 minutes on baking sheets before transferring them to cookie racks to cool completely.