I've been on a bit of a caramel kick lately, so this is the first of a few recipes you'll see with a caramel theme. These salted caramel chocolate chunk cookies were inspired by a bag of caramel filled chips that my mom stuck in my Christmas stocking:

We have a never fail chocolate chip cookie recipe that we whip up all the time: The Best Big, Fat, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie. The secret is the melted butter, which keeps them thick and chewy for days.

I decided to do a little twist on those and make it more caramel-y. In addition to the DelightFulls above, I also found these salted caramel crunch chocolate bars at my local co-op.

If you want to try a this recipe, I recommend finding a similar bar because it really added a nice dark chocolatey/salty/caramel-y touch!

I also grabbed some standard semisweet chocolate chips while I was at it...because why not add a little more chocolate at this point?

Salted Caramel Chocolate Chip Cookies

Adapted from The Best Big, Fat, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie by AllRecipes

MAKES ABOUT 20 BIG COOKIES

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup melted butter
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 cups total of chocolate (I did about a third of each type: DelightFulls, chopped chocolate bar and semisweet chips)
Coarse sea salt for sprinkling

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Cream the melted butter, sugars, eggs and vanilla. Slowly add the other dry ingredients - flour, baking soda and salt.

Form large balls of cookie dough (about ¼ cup) and drop them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Make sure you leave about 3 inches between each ball. Bake for 15-17 minutes.

For the first batch, I sprinkled them with coarse sea salt before baking them, but then realized that the salt kind of ended up dissolving in the oven. I re-sprinkled them as soon as they came out of the oven, and for the rest of the batches, only sprinkled the salt after they were baked.

These. Were. Amazing. They weren't actually that caramel-y after all, but the salt was a biiiiiig hit.

I usually bring baked goods to work to share. We have a company-wide chatroom that people make announcements in about events, meetings, T delays, etc, so usually I'll leave the treats in the kitchen and then make an announcement within the chatroom. This time, after making the announcement that salted caramel chocolate chip cookies were in the kitchen, they were gone in a record time of 8 minutes. Please note that this was before 11am.