Rolled in powdered sugar before baking, chocolate crinkle cookies (often called earthquakes) feature chocolaty fissures that break through the bright white surface during baking. While striking in appearance, these cookies often fall short on taste.
Using a combination of cocoa powder and unsweetened bar chocolate rather than bittersweet chocolate (which contains sugar) certainly upped the intensity, and swapping brown sugar for the granulated created a complex sweetness.
At this point, the cookies had deep, rich flavor, but the exterior cracks were too few and too wide, and the cookies weren’t spreading enough. Using a combination of baking soda and baking powder helpedthe bubbles produced by the leaveners rose to the surface and burst, leaving fissuresbut the cracks gapped.
We had been refrigerating this fluid dough overnight before portioning and baking the cookies, but the cold dough didn’t begin to spread very much until after that dried exterior had formed, forcing the cracks to open wide. The solution was to bake the cookies after letting the dough sit at room temperature for 10 minutes, which was just enough time for the dough to firm up to a scoopable consistency.