I’ve found the cookie-to-die-for recipe, and it comes from Paris. Mokonuts’ cookies are the perfect mix of chewy, squidgy, Japanese, American and Middle Eastern. Rye flour, cranberries and chocolate chips turn out to be the magic formula.
What is Mokonuts?
Moko in Mokonuts is Moko Hirayama, of the duo behind the café/bakery du moment: Mokonuts, in 11th arrondissement, Paris. Together with her husband, Omar Koreitem, they create a mix of Japanese, French, American and Middle Eastern flavours in their pastries and breads, lunch plates and cakes.
I have not visited, but what I have read of the place and the couple, I liked enormously. Plus the cookies, the recipe for which I found in NY Times Cooking, won my heart at the first bite.
Are these the best cookies ever?
A cookie is a cookie is a cookie, you might say: butter, flour and sugar with a handful of chocolate chips thrown in. I thought so, and I was wrong.
Moko’s cookies are a completely different plane of cookie existence, a new dimension of cookieness, hitherto undiscovered cookie quality. They are as nice as they are unusual in their ingredients list!
Sugar is fairly standard, half and half white and brown, as ever. Butter – so far so normal. The flour is the game changer: rye flour, and the dark variety if you can get it, turns the cookies into the wonder of chewy, soft and squidgy bliss.
Who ever knew? Plus the poppy seeds, and I hear Moko uses other seeds for other kinds of her cookies: sesame, maybe sunflower, maybe pumpkin (I’ve only seen the pictures) – what a great idea!
What's the secret of Mokonuts cookies?
I have since experimented with my own flavours and ingredients but these, cranberry-choc chip are the ones I saw first in NYT Cooking and made first.
The process is straightforward but you mustn’t skip the chilling stage when the cookies are shaped – it develops the texture beautifully. I know it’s inhuman to make anyone wait for cookies for 24 hours but trust me – it is gratification worth the delay.
The second awfully important point is the timing of the baking: unless your oven is nuclear powered or to the contrary, barely warm – stick to the ten minutes and not a second longer.
Preheat your oven; don’t use fan/convection if there’s such option, and take them out promptly. The flattening is important too as that finishes cooking the cookies – so skip the smashing at your own risk.