One of Christina Tosi’s creations which I thought was quite creative. Her unique technique using cold butter allows jam packing of maximal butter and sugar to achieve the crust and melt-in-your-mouth texture. And then, she severely underbakes it, not just the typical underbaking of normal chocolate chip cookies for the fudgy interior, but at a very high temperature to develop the crust first sort of like a shell, then take it out of the oven to allow the insides to finish baking .. Ex-vivo? Ok, on the counter haha. One can also place it in the fridge quickly to stop the baking process for greater textural contrast

The result is a natural lava-like texture, crisp exterior and a flowy cookie dough interior. I may be biased as I’m a cookie dough lover (there isn’t any cookie dough of mine that I don’t taste before going into the oven… my guilty pleasure). But two main thoughts of this recipe:

• You may need to introduce this cookie to your guests properly before serving that it is meant to be a cookie dough cookie, not a severely underdone cookie failure, so that they know what to expect in order to enjoy your intentions behind this creation. Of course that kind of defeats the purpose a little. But it’s still something interesting for people to try I feel
• The crispy exterior may not hold up so well in the Singaporean humidity, so it may become floppy easily. I think a possible solution would be to perhaps increase the temperature even more, or to place cookies on a lower rack so that the cookie bottom becomes a solid and stable base. It may compromise the cookie dough texture, but if done properly the top half may still be lava like.

I would keep the flavors simple and classic for this recipe – the texture variation is good enough to prevent tons of confusion on the palate. Another idea is to make them bigger next time (Momofuku style)! This will create a higher “cooked edges” vs cookie dough interior ratio, that more conservative cookie-eaters may enjoy more. Side note: I’ve also seen a recipe where they inject baked chocolate chip cookies with brownie batter as a lava interior. Might be interesting to try also next time!