Baked here
Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Cookie
Last updated
The Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Cookie is the one thing Cafe Meria bakes in-house: a thick, chewy cookie with melted chunks of TCHO Real Fudgy 70% chocolate from single-origin Ghana cacao, finished with sea salt. It is made with coconut oil instead of butter and a King Arthur flour blend with no wheat, so it has no dairy ingredients and no gluten ingredients.
What is in the cookie?
Thirteen ingredients, listed here as we buy them. Where a product has its own ingredient list, that list is included in full.
- Flour blend, no wheat
- King Arthur Measure for Measure: rice flour, whole grain brown rice flour, sorghum flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, cellulose, xanthan gum, and a vitamin and mineral blend (calcium carbonate, niacinamide, reduced iron, thiamin hydrochloride, riboflavin).
- Dark chocolate, 70%
- TCHO Real Fudgy 70%, single-origin Ghana: organic cacao beans, organic cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, organic sunflower lecithin, organic vanilla beans.
- Organic cane sugar, and brown sugar
- Two sugars, in equal parts.
- Organic coconut oil
- In place of butter.
- Organic eggs
- Coconut butter
- One ingredient: organic coconut.
- Raw honey
- Unsweetened soy milk
- Almond flour
- Real vanilla bean
- Ground vanilla bean, not an extract.
- Baking soda and salt
- With a pinch of sea salt on top, out of the oven.
What does it leave out?
None of the following is in our recipe, or in the flour blend, chocolate and coconut butter we bake it with.
- Artificial flavors
- Artificial colors
- Preservatives
- High-fructose corn syrup
- Palm oil or hydrogenated oil
- “Natural flavors” or extracts
- Dairy ingredients
- Wheat ingredients
Two things it does contain, so nobody is surprised: the flour blend includes xanthan gum, cellulose and added vitamins, and the chocolate includes a small amount of sunflower lecithin.
Is the cookie healthy?
No. It is a cookie. It is made with sugar and it is high in saturated fat, most of it from the coconut oil and the dark chocolate. Most of us would be better off eating fewer cookies, ours included. When you do have one, we think you should know exactly what is in it.
| Per cookie | Amount | % daily value |
|---|---|---|
| Calories | 330 | |
| Total fat | 18 g | 23% |
| Saturated fat | 12 g | 60% |
| Cholesterol | 19 mg | 6% |
| Sodium | 333 mg | 14% |
| Total carbohydrate | 46 g | 17% |
| Fiber | 4 g | 15% |
| Total sugars | 27 g | |
| Added sugars | 26.5 g | 53% |
| Protein | 3 g | 6% |
These figures are calculated from our recipe and each ingredient's label. They have not been tested in a lab, so treat them as close estimates. Percent daily values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
Why coconut oil instead of butter?
Because it keeps the cookie free of dairy, and because we know exactly what it is: Kirkland Signature organic virgin coconut oil, cold pressed, with nothing else in the jar. We also choose not to bake with seed oils.
Each cookie has about half a tablespoon of it, 7 grams. Coconut oil is higher in saturated fat than butter: one cookie has about 12 grams of saturated fat, and made with butter it would have about 10. The dark chocolate and the coconut butter account for most of the rest. We use coconut oil for what it is, not because it makes a cookie good for you.
How is it made?
We mix the dough in our kitchen, scoop it into 80 gram balls and rest them overnight in the fridge. They are frozen, then baked from frozen each day we are open, and pulled from the oven while the middle still looks underdone. The sea salt goes on while the cookie is hot.
Who should skip it?
The cookie contains egg, honey, soy and tree nuts (almond and coconut). The chocolate may contain other tree nuts.
It has no gluten ingredients, but it is baked in a kitchen that also handles wheat, and some ingredients come from facilities that handle gluten. We cannot guarantee it is free of traces, and we do not recommend it for guests with celiac disease.
Because it is made with honey and eggs, it is vegetarian and not vegan.