Testing out a chocolate “unchip” cookie hack from Instagram

Happy Halloween! I wanted to celebrate my favorite holiday with an extra post this week. It will be a quick one so I don’t keep you from any holiday festivities. While scrolling on Instagram I came across a video posted by its.halfbaked for “chocolate unchip cookies” and I immediately turned up my nose and thought “no absolutely not, we need to leave chocolate chip cookies alone”. Then I second guessed my reaction and decided to bring this idea here to test out because that’s the whole point of testing social media recipes right? we have to find out if it is worth the hype. I originally thought this was a short video designed to attract you to an online recipe. Upon further inspection, it turns out this is advertising for a secret menu from a baker in Vancouver Washington so there is no recipe to follow which means this test is more of a hack.

With little guidance, I jumped right in. I went ahead and made the Nestle toll house chocolate chip cookie dough. The recipe can be found on any chocolate chip bag or on their website online. I started with melted butter instead of creaming and swapped the sugar amounts from 3/4c brown sugar and 3/4c white sugar, to 1c brown sugar and 1/2c white sugar. I followed the rest of the recipe as written. These slight and easy changes really elevate this recipe. Once the dough was mixed, I refrained from adding the chocolate chip cookies (which felt illegal) and kept half of my dough plain. I chilled the dough for about an hour then scooped it out using a tablespoon sized scoop. They cooked beautifully and evenly but did end up much flatter than the Instagram video. She seemed to have a fluffy tall cookie for this hack, but without a recipe, I went with what I knew, which ended up being a thin flat cookie.

Here is where the hack starts. You melt all of those chocolate chips you left out of the dough and you spoon a small amount of melted chocolate onto parchment paper. Then you press the bottom side of the cookie into the melted chocolate until you can see the chocolate has spread to the edges of the cookies. You do this to every cookie and then set them aside for the chocolate to solidify. It did take awhile for them to solidify, I’d estimate it was around an hour which feels like forever when you’re waiting to eat cookies but they won’t come off the parchment paper until it is solid so you have no choice but to wait.

I peeled all the cookies off the parchment and cut one in half to see how it looked throughout and it was an even coating of chocolate on the bottom. It looked really good. After tasting the cookie, I decided that nope, this didn’t work. This creates a completely different cookie and compared to chocolate chip cookies, it’s worse. I used half my dough and made chocolate chip cookies to compare side by side and the ratio is so drastically different. In the traditional cookie, the chocolate chips are coated in cookie and dispersed throughout the entire cookie, not every bite is chocolate. As a chocolate lover, I felt that the ratio on this “unchip” cookie was too much chocolate. However, this is very likely due to the thin flat cookies I used. I think if I had a cookie recipe like the creator intended, it would have been a much better ratio of cookie to chocolate. I still don’t think that this belongs in the same category as a chocolate chip cookie as I originally thought. This is a brown sugar cookie dipped in chocolate and tastes like it. I absolutely think this hack has potential so in the future I plan to give it another try with a thicker cookie and test it as an isolated cookie, not in comparison to the tried and true chocolate chip cookie that it seems to be modeled after. Would you try this hack out? Let me know if you do, I’d love to hear how it comes out for others!

Here are the links to products I love to use while baking:
Rubber Spatulas – https://amzn.to/3JWDtAA
Tablespoon set – https://amzn.to/4agFQsK  
Oven Mitts – https://amzn.to/3JYq5Mg
Vanilla Bean Paste – https://amzn.to/3QGEsZB
Baking sheet – https://amzn.to/3UGKcDA
Cookie Scoop 1tbsp – https://amzn.to/3UFhuTz
Cookie scoop 3tbsp – https://amzn.to/3wwHRDj
Plastic Measuring Cup – https://amzn.to/4bDJIoV
Glass Measuring Cup – https://amzn.to/44IuX1B
KitchenAid Scraper Attachment – https://amzn.to/3WCPm67
*These are affiliate links meaning if you click on the link and buy the product, I will earn a small commission, but you will not be charged a penny more.