Potato Chip Cookies: a little trashy, all good

What you’ll love about potato chip cookies

1. Flavor + texture: The crisp potato chips along with their salt is a perfect foil to the chocolate caramel, ganache, and toasty pecans in these cookies. Like strawberry and matcha, it’s one of those flavor combinations you don’t know works until you try it.
2. POOLS of chocolate: By using chocolate caramel bars instead of chocolate chips in the cookie base, you’ll get random pools of perfectly melted chocolate throughout the cookies.
3. Easy to make: The toughest thing to do here is wait for the dough balls to chill! Other than that, these chocolate chip cookies variant is very quick and straightforward to make.
4. So pretty: They may be a little trashy topped with a potato chip, but the thick ganache is so pretty against the craggy cookie. That you can decorate these cookies with no fancy tools or big time commitment is excellent for even the most harried bakers.

Trash cookies and making life a little easier

Once upon a time my Mom worked as a professional baker. One of her many jobs was to put together boxes of assorted Christmas cookies for customers. As is the nature of Christmas cookies, some of the cookies were more labor-intensive and fussy for a baker who needed to move fast and be efficient in all things. Mom was always looking for a couple cookies she could sneak into the assortments that could save her some time. One of her favorites for this very purpose was what she called “Trash cookies”.

Trash cookies are basically chocolate chip cookies with added potato chips, though you could also add other salty mix-ins like pretzels, salty nuts, crackers, or even popcorn. The trash idea is to load up your cookie with salty snacky things that weirdly go well with chocolate. As I’ve learned from my pretzel cookies, salty and sweet in any combination is always a winner.

Process for making Potato Chip Cookies

1. Brown the butter: Melt the butter in a small skillet over medium-low heat until the foam starts to subside and you can see brown bits in the skillet. Scrape the butter into a bowl and set the bowl in the freezer for 20 minutes.
2. Freeze the chocolate: Cut up the dark chocolate caramel bars into squarish/rectangularish pieces about 1/2″ wide. Set the pieces on a tray and freeze them while the brown butter cools.
3. Prep the remaining mix-ins: Chop the pecans. Place the chips in a small plastic bag and lightly crush them. By lightly, I mean, flatten your hand over the whole thing once. We want chunks of chips, not dust in the cookies.
4. Make the cookie dough: Mix the flour with the starch, baking soda, and salt in a bowl. Scrape the partially chilled butter into a mixing bowl. Mix in the sugars with the butter just until the sugar is moistened. Add in the vanilla, eggs and milk, mixing just until smooth. Add in the flour and the chips, pecans, and frozen chocolate pieces, mixing just until you get a dough that sticks together.
5. Scoop the cookies: Scoop out 2 ounce portions of dough onto a sheet tray. Chill the dough balls for 30 minutes.
6. Make the ganache: While the cookie dough balls are chilling, follow the recipe for Thick Ganache for Cookies. You can keep the ganache at room temperature until you’re ready to decorate the cookies. It will thicken to the perfect spreadable consistency as it sits.
7. Bake: Place 6 cookies onto parchment

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   lined baking sheets. Bake the cookies in a 375 F (190 C) for 12 minutes, rotating the sheets top to bottom and back to front halfway through baking. Bake the rest of the dough balls.
8. Decorate: Cool the cookies until they’re no longer warm to the touch. Spread half of the top of each cookie with a couple teaspoons of the ganache. Top each smear of ganache with half of a potato chip for the finishing touch.

Tips for making the best potato chip cookies

1. Freeze the chocolate caramel pieces: Any time you work with caramel candy in a cookie, the caramel can get overheated and either melt out of the cookie in pools or tend to disappear into the cookie matrix. If you freeze the caramel bits, you’ll control this process so that you’ll still have caramel flavor and texture on the inside of the cookie.
2. Be gentle with the chips: You don’t want to pulverize the chips. Lightly crush them in a plastic bag before mixing them in the cookie dough. This way you’ll still get a good bite of crunch in your cookies.
3. Optional but awesome–Ring the cookies: I don’t remember who I learned this from, but if you take a plain round cutter and rotate it around the cookies as they come out of the oven, you’ll neaten up the edges and help the cookies keep a rounder, more uniform shape. This process will build up the edges a little too, making them thicker and a little more textural. It makes a huge difference in the look of the cookies, though you can skip it too.
4. Leave the nice side un-frosted: I envisioned the tops of these cookies with only half of the top covered with ganache and the potato chip. This way you can still see the craggy chocolate chip cookie texture underneath. On each cookie, there’s probably a nicer half–pick the plainer side for frosting.

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