The Best Homemade Double Chocolate Biscuits

I love a good biscuit. And a really great one (in my book) is one that is crisp, crumbly and packed with a flavour I love. I am not a big fan of biscuits that are too dense or moist; except for an occasional chewy chocolate chip cookie.

As a kid, biscuits were always store-bought, never made at home. They were either packaged varieties bought from the local grocery store, or the unbranded (but several times more scrumptious) nankhatais or coconut makrooms sitting in large, glass jars inside grubby, roadside bakeries.

My favourite was the crisp, cracked ginger biscuit that used to be sold by the kilo at most neighbourhood “dry fruit” stores in Bombay. These biscuits were a rich brown colour, and had a spicy flavour of ground ginger. Another relished variety was the oval-shaped Jim Jams (if I recall the name correctly), sandwiched with cream and fruity jam in the centre. The biscuit was nothing to write about, and was tooth achingly sweet. But the real fun lay in prying apart its sandwiched halves and licking off the creamy jam before eating the biscuit.

The only store-bought variety of biscuit that seemed to lack any appeal for me was the simple chocolate biscuit. Till date, I haven’t eaten a store-bought chocolate biscuit that has really hit the spot and made me reach out for seconds (grand chocolate cookies in fancy coffee shops included). They just didn’t seem to pack a strong enough chocolate punch, and were usually too dry and floury with an insipid cocoa flavour.

Which brings me to the real purpose of this blog post. As I discovered quite gleefully this week, it is deceivingly simple to bake a batch of crisp, eggless, double chocolate biscuits at home.

Minimum effort and maximum flavour guaranteed. Once you have given these a try, you will avoid packaged chocolate biscuits whenever possible. It took me a little over 60 minutes to make these; all from gathering the ingredients to tucking away the cooled biscuits in a container. No exaggeration.

All you need is butter, sugar, cocoa, flour and some milk chocolate.

The secret to this recipe’s success is its butter-sugar-flour ratio. If I have to nitpick, I will have to say that this is more a recipe for an intense chocolate shortbread than just a chocolate biscuit. Shortbread is a type of Scottish biscuit, made using one part sugar, two parts butter and three parts flour. And it is this ratio that I have more or less used in my double chocolate biscuit recipe.

Shortbread is named so for its ‘short’ or crumbly texture. This texture is a result of the high butter content in the dough, which hinders the formation of long protein strands (called gluten) in the flour. It keeps the biscuit dough from being stretchy and elastic, and the biscuit itself from being too hard.

What you get instead is a rich chocolate biscuit with a delicate, buttery crunch. And the cocoa and the milk chocolate deliver that much-needed double dose of chocolate in this recipe.

Trust me, it’s a cup of hot chocolate in a biscuit.

Double Chocolate Biscuits

Ingredients

180 grams salted butter, softened

90 grams caster sugar

220 grams flour

3-4 tablespoons cocoa

100 grams of any cooking dark or milk chocolate, chopped into bits

Method

Preheat oven at 160 degree Celsius.

Mix together the softened butter and caster sugar in a large bowl. Add the cocoa to the flour and set aside. Alternately, add in chocolate bits and flour mixture to the butter. Gently pat the mixture and bring it together.

A tip to ensure that crumbly texture is to handle this biscuit dough very delicately. You may gently pat it and bring it together into a ball; but DO NOT knead or stretch it as if it were chapatti atta! Doing this will only activate the gluten in the dough and make the biscuits rock hard.

At this stage, the dough will be very soft and crumbly. Divide it into two parts and roll each of these parts into a cylinder (5 cm diameter or so).

Cover and freeze for around 20 minutes. Cut into disks of 1 cm thickness and lay on a parchment paper placed on a baking tray.

Bake in the oven at 160 degree Celsius for 12 minutes. Remove them from the oven and leave them on the tray for 15-20 minutes before storing them in an airtight container. 

The biscuits may still seem soft when you get them out of the oven. But they will harden as they cool.