AK Cookies

I need a cookie. You?

Typically, I don’t post cookie recipes that I haven’t tested more than once, but what the hell, I’m feeling wild. This recipe is in the current issue of Lucky Peach, and for years had been Peter Meehan’s secret house cookie, which he got from a friend who lived in Alaska, hence the name. In the article, Meehan confesses to eating AK cookies all day long, describing them as, “the ideal companion to the first coffee of the day, a buffer between the quiet of dawn and the demands of the day to come.”

That was enough for me. Make ‘em.

Source: Peter Meehan and Lucky Peach

Ingredients

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups (256 g) flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
• 12-oz chocolate chips (I used Sharffen Berger semi-sweet bars, which I rough chopped.)
• 2 cups quick-cooking oats (I used 1-minute, but rolled might be fine, too.)
• 1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
2. Using a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugars on medium-high speed until pale yellow (never happened for me), homogenous, and smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla extract and mix for another five minutes. Add the dry ingredients in order (or whisk the flour, baking soda and salt together separately, if you, as I, like to complicate things), mixing them in on low speed, just until each is incorporated into the dough.
3. Use two soupspoons or an ice cream scoop, form the dough into lumps about the size of a squash ball. (I weighed mined into 36 g or 1.25 oz portions)
4. Scoop out all of the dough and chill it on a quarter sheet pan in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before baking. If you're not baking the whole batch, freeze the balls on the sheet tray before transferring them into a freezer bag. When you are ready to bake, space them well on a Silpat- or parchment-lined sheet pan and bake for 11-12 minutes. The cookies will look pale and not cooked when you remove them from the oven. Have patience — they will continue cooking on the sheetpan and will firm up perfectly. Let them cool a bit (or completely) on the sheets, then transfer them to wire racks to fully cool before serving. Meehan's words: These cookies are best when they have fully cooled (it's true), though you will undoubtedly eat some warm because it will take you years to develop the patience to ignore the siren's call until they are ready. You are only human.

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