White plate filled with chocolate cookies filled with white chocolate chips.

How to Make Chocolate Cookies:

These cookies are made with a chocolate-based cookie dough that is filled with two kinds of chocolate chips. The edges bake up crisp with soft and chewy centers. We use this base cookie dough for our Chocolate Cherry Cookies and Valentine Cookies.

Here’s how to make them:

Beat butter with a combination of brown sugar and granulated sugar. The combination of these two sugars will produce cookies that are soft and chewy, with a slight crispness around the edges.
Add eggs and vanilla extract.
Add dry ingredients: a combination of flour, cocoa powder, cornstarch, salt, and baking soda.
Stir in lots of chocolate chips! I use a combination of white chocolate and semisweet chocolate. Feel free to use your favorite; bittersweet or milk chocolate would be great, too!
Bake until the edges are set and the center is still slightly underdone.

Ingredients for making chocolate cookies.

Baking Tips:

Make sure your butter isn’t too soft. It should be cool room temperature (still slightly cool to the touch). If your butter is too soft, or almost melting, these cookies will spread too much while baking. If you accidentally over-soften your butter just chill the dough for an hour or two before baking.

Chill the dough for thicker cookies. If you’d prefer cookies that are more thick and puffy than those pictured, simply chill the cookie dough for about 30 minutes before baking.

Once you have scooped and placed your cookie dough balls on the baking sheets, press a few extra chocolate chips on the outside of the dough balls. This makes for a prettier cookie.

Underbake! These cookies should be removed from the oven when the edges are set but the center is still slightly underbaked. This ensures that your cookies will be soft and fudgy. Overbaking will produce a more crisp cookie.

If you want your cookies extra fudgy, eat them while they are still warm. The chocolate chips will be melty and gooey.

Chocolate cookie dough ball topped with chocolate chips.

How to turn these cookies into ice cream sandwiches:

If you want to turn your cookies into ice cream sandwiches (hint: you DO!), here are my tips:

Option 1: Place a scoop of vanilla ice cream onto the underside of a cookie. Use the back of a spoon to carefully spread the ice cream, then top with another cookie.

Option 2 (pictured): Using a sharp knife, cut directly through a pint of ice cream, making thin disc-like slices. Peel off the outer paper from each slice of ice cream and immediately place it between two cookies. Note: I recommend wiping down the outside of the pint before cutting into it.

Tip: Slightly underbaked cookies work best for this. The cookie should be easy to bite through without squishing the ice cream out the sides.