Almost Levain Bakery cookies

For those of you who have already been to New York, you probably know THE Levain Bakery cookies : huge cookies, always sold lukewarm, topped with nuts and milk chocolate (for the classic version, they also have a 100% chocolate version, one with peanut butter and one with raisins). I have already had the opportunity to taste them several times, but I did not want to wait for a next trip to enjoy myself, so for the past few months I have regularly made cookies (lots of cookies) to get as closer as possible of the original recipe. I helped myself with this vidéo in which we see the two founders of Levain Bakery preparing their famous cookies ; in the absence of quantities, I thus retrieved the list of ingredients and also could see the texture of the dough at different times of the preparation. I wanted to respect the original recipe by using milk chocolate, but since I didn't want to have super sweet cookies, I still used strong cocoa chocolate (Valrhona bahibé, 46% cocoa). You can replace it with another milk chocolate, I recommend minimum 40% cocoa (there are even more than 50% cocoa now in supermarkets), or even dark chocolate if you prefer. The other key ingredient is the nut, I tried to replace it with hazelnut but the result and therefore the texture are not the same. Finally, I give at the end of the recipe a lot of information about cooking, of course you may need to adapt all this to your oven and your equipment. If you've read it all, you can start preheating your oven, you deserve it!



Prep time : 15 minutes + 10 minutes cooking
For 8 (really really big) cookies :

Ingredients :

230g butter
105g muscovado sugar
100g caster sugar
100g eggs
140g flour 45
210g flour 55
20g cornstarch
2g baking powder
2g baking soda
2g salt
210g chopped nuts
260g of bahibé chocolate chips (or another strong milk chocolate in cocoa, so as not to have too sweet cookies)

Recipe :

The best is to make the recipe with an electric mixer, or a pastry robot with the whisk, but you can still make it by hand.
Whip the butter with the sugars. Then add the eggs, whisking quickly to incorporate them.





In a separate bowl mix the dry ingredients : flours, cornstarch, salt, baking powder and bakind soda.
Add them to the butter-sugar-egg mixture, whisk until you have a homogeneous batter (but no longer). Add the chopped nuts, still with the electric mixer, then the chocolate chips. If necessary, stir again with a maryse so that the chocolate and nuts are evenly distributed.





Preheat the oven to 220°C in static heat with the rack at the bottom of the oven (this is important, the result will not be the same with fan oven or with the rack in the middle).
Make 170g cookie balls (you will have 8 with these proportions) and place them, without crushing them, well spaced, on a tray covered with a baking mat (you can also use parchment paper, but I prefer the result with a silicone baking mat); you can bake 4 cookies at a time on a tray.



Put the cookies in the oven for 10 minutes then lower the temperature to 200°C and continue cooking for 2 minutes (they should be nicely browned but still soft, they will finish baking on the hot tray out of the oven), then let them stand on their plate for about fifteen minutes. Finally, enjoy !