Best Recipe: Payard's Flourless Chocolate Walnut Cookies

There is a wonderful French-style bakery a few miles from my home. One of my favorite treats is their flourless chocolate cookie. It has a crispy cracked crust with tiny chocolate chips in the soft, chewy center - Yum!! When I asked about the type of cookie, I was told that it was a meringue. Hmmm, I thought. Meringue? These did not look like the tasty little meringue's like those on Joy of Baking, or "Mom's Chocolate Chip Meringue" cookies on SmittenKitchen. These are very tasty, but not the kind of cookie I was looking for.

After several hours of searching on Epicurious.com, Food Network.com, and Google, for meringue cookie recipes without finding what I was looking for,  it occurred to me that I needed a different approach. I changed the search terms from "chocolate meringue" to "flourless chocolate" cookie. Now I had a new set of recipes to sort. After several minutes of skimming result pages it became obvious that the number one recipe that was referenced the most was famous Chef François Payard's Flourless Chocolate Walnut Cookies. This was it - my search was over.

Oh, are these delicious!This has now become my go-to cookie for fast and wonderful cookies that get raves every time they are served. For those of you in NY, go to Payard’s Upper East Side pâtisserie and buy a few dozen for yourself. If you happened to buy Payard's latest book last year, it is featured  in Chocolate Epiphany: Exceptional Cookies, Cakes, and Confections for Everyone.Tasty treats can also be found on his online e-Boutique.

For those of you like me, who live far from NY, you can find this cookie recipe, and links to related articles, online in the New York Magazine article, Flourless Chocolate-Walnut Cookies, April 13, 2008.

I have made these cookies a dozen times in the last 2 months for family and gifts, with toasted walnuts and pecans, tiny bittersweet chocolate bits, and plain. They are always very good. If you are not familiar with this style of recipe, it doesn't look like it will work with the ingredients called for. Persevere, they are wonderful.