Faux-reo, the Oreo knock-off

What? What was that? I’m sorry I couldn’t hear you over the sound of how AWESOME these cookies are! My husband is a HUGE oreo fan. He’ll eat a whole row of oreos in one sitting. So when I came across this recipe a few weeks ago it immediately moved to the top of my to-make list. Now that I’ve made one batch I’m already planning on making another tonight. Oh so good.

I made my cookies quite large unintentionally. They turned out about 4-5 inches in diameter and they ended up more on the cripsy side versus gooey and soft. But still fabulous. Next time I’m going to use my large Pampered Chef scoop and bake them for the minimum amount of time.

Ingredients:

1-1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup dutch-process cocoa*
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cubed and room temp
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/3 cup milk
1-1/2 cups chopped white chocolate (a 4-oz. Ghiradelli bar yielded 1.5 cups for me)

(Note from original source)

*Substituting with natural unprocessed cocoa is not recommended. The Oreo-like flavor comes from the richer dutch-processed cocoa. I used Hershey Special Dark blend of dutch-processed and natural because I cannot find pure dutch-processed in these parts for the life of me!

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F and line baking sheets with silicone baking mat or parchment paper.

Whisk together flour, salt, baking powder and cocoa, and set aside. Beat the butter on medium-high until light and add sugars, creaming well. Add the vanilla and beat until smooth. Add the flour mixture in 2 batches, alternately with the milk in one batch, mixing well. Chill dough for 15 minutes.

Scoop the dough onto a parchment- or silpat-lined cookie sheet, press down on them slightly, and bake (see note below). Let the cookies cool completely on the cookie sheet and store in an air-tight container.

Note: Shawnda states that she uses a No 12 scoop to drop a well rounded scoop of chilled cookie dough (a little less than 1/2 cup of cookie dough) and bakes for 24 minutes. At this size she gets 8 or 9 cookies with a diameter of 6 inches using the No 12 scoop. If you scoop a more normal sized cookie, she estimates 12-16 minutes in the oven. I used a large cookie scoop from Pampered Chef, which is approximately 3 Tablespoons in size, and I got 13 cookies out of my batch, with 18-20 minutes in the oven seeming to do the trick.

Source: Brown Eyed Baker