Four ingredients and a few simple steps transform everyday graham crackers into cookies that rival the fanciest ones in the bakery case. Before you taste one of these extraordinary graham cracker cookies, take a moment to breathe in the intoxicating scent of sweet caramel and chocolate. Then take a bite and feel the crisp, crumbly, caramel-coated cracker dissolving on your tongue, followed by the smooth silkiness of the chocolate.
The recipe for these cookies was handed down by my grandmother. I’ve told the story before, about how she loved to trade recipes with her friends, and how her recipe cards – scrawled with her rushed and angular handwriting, light on instruction and heavy on abbreviations and allusions to techniques she knew too well to bother explaining – often identified the friend who’d shared the recipe. The card for these cookies called them Lucille’s Graham Cracker Cookies – that would be her friend Lucille McCabe. I don’t know where Lucille found this recipe, but it was one of Mamie’s favorites, and it’s always been one of mine. And if you’ve been reading for a while you know what a fan of graham crackers John is. He flipped for these.
I did make one significant change to the original recipe: I added the chocolate. It’s not like I thought there was something missing all those times my grandmother made these when I was a kid. But (many) years had gone by when I dug up the old recipe card and decided to make these graham cracker cookies for myself, and from this new perspective it just seemed like a drizzle of dark chocolate was a very good idea. It’s the chocolate that gives these cookies their candy-shop aroma and mouthfeel – they really are more like candy than cookies. It seems so simple, just store-bought graham crackers topped with an effortless, two-ingredient caramel, toasted nuts and a drizzle of chocolate. Sometimes there’s magic in simplicity.
Lucille’s Graham Cracker Cookies will keep for 3 or 4 days, packed in an airtight container at room temperature. I would advise against freezing them – if you don’t think you can use all the cookies within 4 days, make a smaller batch – the recipe is easy to scale up or down as needed.
To see these cookies as part of a complete menu, including a game plan for timing and sequencing all the prep, check out my post for Saturday March 20, 2021.
Chocolate Caramel Graham Cracker Cookies
Ingredients
- 1/3 cup chopped pecans
- 8 graham crackers (8 full rectangles each with 4 perforated sections)
- 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 6 tablespoons (3/8 cup) light brown sugar
- 3 ounces semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, chopped
Directions
- Step 1 Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Lightly toast the pecans in a small, dry skillet over medium heat just until lightly browned and fragrant, about 5 minutes.
- Step 2 Line a baking sheet with foil. Carefully break each graham cracker in half into 2 squares. Arrange the crackers in 4 rows of 4 squares, closely packed with all sides touching, to form one big square. Fold up the foil on each end of the square to form sides, to keep the crackers from separating.
- Step 3 Put the butter and brown sugar in a small saucepan over medium-high heat. Start stirring as soon as the butter starts to melt. Bring the mixture to a boil, then boil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Pour the caramel topping over the crackers, carefully spreading it out to cover the entire surface without separating the crackers. Sprinkle the pecans over the top in an even layer. Bake the cookies for 10 minutes, until the topping is set, golden and bubbling.
- Step 4 Put the chopped chocolate in a small, heat safe bowl. Microwave the chocolate on High power for 30 seconds at a time, stirring in between, until the chocolate is melted and smooth.
- Step 5 Set a cooling rack over a baking sheet lined with wax paper. As soon as the cookies come out of the oven, use a thin, flexible spatula to carefully lift and separate the cookies, one at a time, and transfer them to the rack. Cool 5 minutes.
- Step 6 Spoon the chocolate into a small zip-lock bag, cut a small piece off the corner with scissors, and pipe the chocolate in a diagonal zigzag pattern over the cookies. If you’re not eating the cookies right away, let them cool, uncovered, until the chocolate is set and dry before transferring them to an airtight container. They can be stacked, carefully.
