Dining Out The City Bakery Chocolate Chip Cookies

While discussing the best upscale breakfasts in New York I remembered that I forgot to mention that the chocolate chip cookies at The City Bakery are outstanding and diehard fans, like myself, have been trying to replicate them for some time now without any luck. But, I think I finally figured out the recipe. Or at least how they do it.

I was eating one of their cookies and noticed that there were two different textures that couldn't possibly come from one single recipe for cookie dough.

The cookies are really two cookies in one: A layer of super-chewy chocolate chip cookie dough (likely with corn syrup to make it extra chewy) that surrounds very soft chocolate chip cookie --dough almost like a pie crust. When you bite into one of their cookies, you can almost see what looks like the two different doughs.

They may very well take a very thin layer (about 4-inches in diameter) of dense/chewy cookie dough and then place another thin (3-inch diameter) layer of light/soft cookie dough on top of it. The edges of the bottom (larger) layer appear to be wrapped up to contain the outer edges of the light/soft cookie dough. Then a few small pieces of the dense chewy cookie dough appear to be scattered on top of it all to mix the textures up on the top of the cookie. The whole thing is sort of like a pie crust where the dense/chewy cookie dough is the crust for the soft/light cookie dough filling. It's either that, or they simply wrap some of the chewy dough around a small ball of the soft/light cookie dough and smash it flat into the cookie sheet. Sounds like a lot of work, which is why I haven't tried making it out yet at home.

Either way, stop by The City Bakery (@ 3W 18th Street) and have one of those cookies with a pure melted hot chocolate and homemade marshmallow and it's sublime.