Chocolate Cookies

Pastry chef Mathew Rice grew up loving an Oreo-like sandwich cookie called Murray Chocolate Cremes. In this homage, he creates a malty filling for milk-chocolate wafers by mixing butter and sugar with Ovaltine.

Kevin Sbraga varies these wonderful nutty biscotti, sometimes dipping them in melted dark chocolate for an extra layer of flavor.

A stuffed cookie is like a sandwich cookie, only with more cream on the inside—it's fatter, fuller and (if you're the kind of person who twists apart the cookies to get to the cream) better. Pastry chef Jessica Sullivan makes hers with nutty chocolate-chip cookies and silky chocolate ganache.

Dorie Greenspan loves using Valrhona cocoa to make these spicy, unexpectedly tender cookies, flecked with flaky Maldon salt. "It's so rich and dark," she says.

Here is the chocolate lovers' cookie: a deeply rich, moist cookie speckled with hazelnuts, pistachios and dried cherries.

Melissa Rubel's grandmother's flourless cookies are crisp around the edges and chewy on the inside.

Dark chocolate with a high cacao content is lower in sugar and higher in antioxidants than milk chocolate. For this ingenious snack, Grace Parisi coats wafer-thin crispbreads in dark chocolate so that they seem like candy bars studded with flaky Maldon sea salt, chewy crystallized ginger and candied fennel seeds.

New York pastry chef François Payard's divinely gooey chocolate cookies are flourless, which makes them ideal for Passover baking.

Matt Lewis and Blair Vansant, specialize in homey desserts with a modern twist, like this tower of crispy chocolaty cookies sandwiched with chocolate pastry cream and whipped cream. When it comes time to assemble the parts, Lewis says, they never seem to have enough cookies—a result of excessive employee snacking.

Grace Parisi's crumbly, ultra-peanutty cookies require only four ingredients: puffed-corn cereal, peanut butter cups, peanut butter and chocolate sprinkles. The powdery texture of the ground cereal prevents the cookies from feeling sticky.

The chocolate wafers can be stored between sheets of wax paper in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks or frozen for up to 1 month. The filled cookies can be stored at room temperature for up to 2 days.

These marvelous Christmas cookies combine chocolate with spicy gingerbread. "I was tired of basic gingerbread," says Matt Lewis. "And my connection to chocolate is really deep." An added benefit of these cookies: The supple dough is very easy to work with, and the scraps can be rerolled and cut out.

From the authors of Heirloom Cooking with the Brass Sisters, these slender wafers have a deep cocoa flavor and a wonderful cornmeal crunch.

Chocolate with cocoa nibs adds an ingenious twist to the classic chocolate chip cookie.

Be the star of a cookie swap with these gorgeous sandwich cookies. If you’re feeling lazy, opt for Maury’s Cookie Dough, available at most supermarkets.

The only thing more decadent than two layers of chocolate is two layers of chocolate with caramel tucked in between.

This is Jacques Torres's recipe for sablés, a classic French butter cookie with a sandy, crumbly texture (sablé means "sandy")—though this fabulously dense version is actually more like shortbread.

Thumbprint cookies—made by pressing a small round of dough with the thumb to form an indentation—are great for filling with chocolate or jam. These thumbprints have a creamy, minty white-chocolate filling. Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito often mix chopped Andes mint candies into the batter, but any kind of mint-flavored chocolate works well.

Classic and highly textured on their own, snickerdoodles are a favorite of cookie lovers. The chocolate version is the perfect complement to the kick of cinnamon.

“Mallomars are my absolute favorite sweet treat,” says Della Gossett, executive pastry chef at Spago Beverly Hills. “In my variation, crunchy peppermint candy nicely balances the pillowy marshmallow filling.”