Technical Bake #16: Milk Chocolate Digestive Cookies

Hello Friends and Fellow Bakers! WHOOSH, I can not believe how the time is flying. I have been in the weeds at work the last couple of weeks which is why it is taking me forever to get these posts done. The good news is there is light at the end of the tunnel and I have not fallen behind on the actual baking, just the writing. So have no fear! I am still ahead of schedule to finish this wacky project in a calendar year. Also, fun fact: if my total number of bakes was still going to be 32 as originally planned (we are up to 41 now since there was a bonus episode and Season 5 is going to drop before I finish), this post would have been the halfway mark. Coolness! Bonus points to you if you followed the logic of that last sentence, as I am clearly off my rocker.

This week’s bake is Milk Chocolate Digestive Cookies (recipe here) as featured on Season 2 Biscuits and Bars week of GCBS. Digestive cookies are mild, low sugar wheat cookies with added fibre. They have big Depression Era Energy^TM and are often served at low-rent community events here in the Great White North. I don’t think I have ever seen or eaten homemade ones before, because why would anyone bother making such a boring batch of cookies? Maybe I’m just not WASPy enough to appreciate them. Which actually goes a long way to explain why Dave made such a big deal about how great they are, now that I think about it….

SO. Here we are again with another bake I found at once confusing and uninteresting when I saw it on the list. It is well established here at Baking Summit that I dislike making cookies and I hate working with chocolate, so this whole concept was very eyeroll inducing for me. When I hear “digestive cookies” I think of Arrowroot cookies, or the cheap boxed “family digestive cookies” aka the most boring boxed cookies at the grocery store. As far as I am aware, the target demographic for cookies like these are seniors and toddlers (why do those two categories seem to have so much overlap?). Is the next season of the show going to feature pablum as a bake? These also didn’t seem like they would be methodologically very difficult, so what’s the angle CBC!?

I have learned by now that if a bake from GCBS seems too easy for the show, the challenge will be some form of sadistic psychological torture centred around time management and/or complete uniformity. The overarching philosophy of these challenges seems to be “it’s so easy, there is no excuse not to get it perfect.” To that I say: FAIR POINT. At the risk of over-generalizing, it is my lived experience and observation that advanced bakers as a group are pretty compulsive about chasing perfection. Put 10 of them in a humid tent and tease them with a too-easy recipe and a time limit and watch all of their heads explode. Damn fine television.

I fared well on this bake. The method is as easy as it looks, so I, like the bakers on the show, spent all of my time just obsessing about every little detail and trying to keep them as uniform as possible. If you’re looking for a glimpse of how this category of challenges are an OCD minefield, let’s enumerate every relevant aspect of this bake I found to obsess about, shall we?

• Uniform shape: My round cutter is a bit flimsy so they didn’t all come out perfectly circular
• Clean edges: the recipe calls for wheat bran so the crumb of the dough is a bit coarse. 
• Visible stamp: gotta get that perfectly deep into the dough. Also I had to stamp each cookie twice so I was fussing a lot over centering the two stamps neatly
• Even bake: difficult to get a brown cookie dough to come out consistently
• Consistent roll-out: each pan has cookies the same thickness
• Chocolate work: proper temper and visible fork striations. Successful dip on the oblong side without getting smears on the plain side
• Correct bake temp/time: cookies should snap without being overcooked. Correct and consistent colour on bottom side

Does that all sound a bit compulsive? I don’t even know anymore. What I do know is the unfortunate thing about baking (if there is one) is it greatly rewards my obsessive nature, because these came out mostly aces. I kind of wish I had rolled them a little bit thicker, and I dipped a couple of them the wrong side down LIKE A CHAMP. Also my flimsy cutter irritated me, but on the whole, I nailed this bake. 

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Step 1: Dough

This is a basic sugar cookie dough with no chilling and added fibre in the form of wheat bran. All ingredients except the milk are blitzed in the food processor. Just enough milk is added to bring it together and that’s it. Easy peasy

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Step 2: Roll out

Nothing special to say here! The dough is rolled to about ¼ inch thickness and cut into rounds. The recipe didn’t specify what size cutter to use, so I went with 3.5inch which is probably what they used on the show. 

In the episode, they used a custom stamp to emboss the cookies with the show title. I bought a little stamp kit to make mine extra fancy, if I do say so myself. Some of the bakers on the show had difficulty with the stamping. One person struggled a bit with the stamp sticking to the dough, another didn’t manage to get the print to come out clean in the oven. These problems could be due to a couple of different factors. The stamp sticking could be from the temperature in the room being a bit too high, which would make sense as the show is filmed in a tent outside in the summer. It is notorious for being stifling and humid in the tent, which is the absolute worst environment for baking. More evidence that CBC is really just domming the hell out of everyone for lolz playing mind games with the contestants. It could also be from adding a bit too much liquid to the dough. The trouble getting the prints to hold up well in the oven could be due to too much flour, or the stamp wasn’t pressed deep enough into the dough. 

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The majority of my stamps turned out well. I had a few that didn’t have totally clean lines coming out of the oven, but on the whole they were good and I made enough good ones as required on the show. So put a tick beside that box, imaginary judges.

Step 3: Temper Chocolate and Dip

Ah yes, my favourite. NOT. Regular readers are aware of my lack of enthusiasm for chocolate, but to summarize: chocolate can go pound sand. That said, I hate to admit it, but I am continuing to improve at chocolate work in spite of myself since starting this project. So even though I was not particularly excited about tempering chocolate again, I found myself approaching it with something more like resignation than irritation or anxiety. I call that a win for me. Perhaps by the end of this, I will only dislike eating chocolate and feel… neutral… about working with it? TIME WILL TELL.

There are different methods of tempering chocolate, and I have mentioned before that I like to do “seeding.” The chocolate gets heated to high temp (temperatures vary depending on the type of chocolate, but high temp is usually in the neighbourhood of 120F), then taken off the heat. Unmelted pieces of chocolate are added and stirred until melted. Then the chocolate needs to be cooled to low temp (again temps vary, but usually in the neighbourhood of 80F), and brought back up to working temp (about 85F). It’s the slowest method, but I find it the most foolproof, and so far, every recipe for this project has instructed this method. 

Once the chocolate is in temper, the cookies are dipped, stamp side up, and left to cool. The challenge here was getting the cookies in and out of the chocolate without smearing the clean side and I wanted to make sure the chocolate actually covered the edges of the cookies. I didn’t want those cut edges showing and I figured out how to get it looking the way I wanted. Once the chocolate was set I had to scrape some chocolate off the fronts of a few of them, but overall, I navigated the chocolate situation competently. 

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If nothing else, this bake was a fun unicorn chase. It certainly kept me entertained for a couple of hours, anyway. This wasn’t so much a panicky perfectionist experience, it was more of an engaging challenge for the day. It’s validating to see a bake on this list and think “oh yes, I can definitely do that one perfectly if I apply myself” and then pull it off. It helps build my confidence for the more challenging bakes on the list and sustains me when things go sideways. I didn’t develop the baking skill set I have overnight. I had to perfect the easy stuff to get here, and this was a fun reminder. It is important to practice fundamentals in order to keep skills up to standard. As far as making cookies and working with chocolate goes, this was relatively painless. It pains me to admit they were also delicious. You win this round, CBC! Onward I go!

Hey, bakers! Check out my BAKER’S PANTRY index if you want to deep dive on specific ingredients when attempting this bake for yourself