When you check in to a DoubleTree Hotel, you're immediately handed a paper envelope with a gooey, chewy, chocolate- and walnut-studded cookie. We're not talking the regular Otis Spunkmeyers every apartment leasing agency keeps on hand (though those are great in their own right); DoubleTree cookies are on another level.
People have begged for the recipe for years, with searches for the treat spiking during peak travel periods—primarily November and December, which also happens to be cookie-swap season, and in the summer—according to Google Trends, but the company has remained famously tight-lipped about its recipe. You can buy the dough in six-pound tubs, or pick up a tin of six already baked cookies, through the hotel's separate, cookie-focused website, along with shirts proclaiming your Cookie Monster-esque proclivities.
For those of us who want to make it ourselves, completely from scratch, it takes a little sleuth work. Here's what we do know: Each cookie weighs about two ounces, and contains 20 or so chocolate chips.
From there, we had to go on taste, baking batches until we found some a similar flavor and texture. There needed to be plenty of butter, and a little more brown sugar than white, to give it the dough that rich, slightly caramel-y taste. We added a pinch of cinnamon too, so the spice would play up the chopped walnuts and oats, giving it a little bit of an oatmeal cookie flavor, but not so much that it detracts from what this is at its core: A bangin' chocolate chip cookie. (Some may say we got carried away; I prefer that we appreciate the fine science that is dissecting a cookie. And okay, we're moderately bonkers, but we're the good kind, right?)
We used a 1/4 cup-sized measuring cup to scoop out mega dough balls, creating palm-sized cookies like you'd find at the hotel. Baked until just golden, and they were absolute perfection.
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