Cast-Iron–Pan Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

My friend Mark Henry can do anything with steel—and does. While he’s primarily a knife maker, he’s also a pots-and-pans man, crafting beautiful cast-iron pans with materials from Australia, where he was born. Mark’s wife, Natasha, decided to try baking in her husband’s pans and chose my classic chocolate chip cookie as her test. What she made was a gorgeous cookie-cake, something I’d never tried. Yes, I know that the back of every bag of chocolate chips suggests baking the dough in a large rectangular pan (aka a brownie pan), but that never appealed to me. And then along came the cast-iron–pan cookie, and I couldn’t wait to get into the kitchen. Baked this way, the good old choc-chipper becomes something completely different. The long, slow bake in cast iron causes the edges and bottom of the cookie to caramelize. The thickness makes it chewy, especially at the center. And the sheer size of the cookie—9 plus inches in diameter, 1 inch high—with its surface speckled with chips and add-ins—makes it not just alluring, but dramatic, a description rarely applied to an everyday cookie.To celebrate my conversion, I tweaked my recipe, adding lots of chopped chocolate (I like milk chocolate here), coconut and apricots. And because the coconut and apricots are sweet, I cut down the sugar. Bake it big, cut it small, get out the tea and thank Mark and Natasha for turning a standard into a standout.A word on the pan: I use a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet that’s 9 1/2 inches in diameter and a generous 1 1/2 inches high. If you don’t have such a pan, use a 9-inch or, better yet, 10-inch cake pan. You won’t get the same caramelization, but you will get the chew and the flavor. Keep an eye on the baking time; it will be at least 10 minutes less.Recipe excerpted from Dorie Greenspan’s newest cookbook Dorie’s Cookies. Click here to purchase your own copy.