For the past few years at the end of October, beginning of November, I have built an ofrenda (altar) to celebrate Día de los Muertos. I started this tradition the year my maternal grandmother passed away – 2020, a challenging year for so many other reasons as well. It started small – a favorite photo of her, some salt and water, a candle, marigolds, and a little sugar skull I bought in the Mission. I didn’t have much space on my fireplace mantle, but it was my way of honoring her memory. 

A little over a year later, in September 2021, post vaccines and a move to NYC, my family and I were finally able to hold a memorial for my grandmother. We decided to create an enormous ofrenda in her memory. We spent days pulling together the components. My aunt had grown marigolds in her garden and harvested them, filling Home Depot-size buckets with the flowers. She made a giant paper mache calavera (skull) as a centerpiece. My sister made home-made sugar skulls and we decorated them painstakingly with royal icing, beads, and faux flowers. She made pan de muerto from scratch and packed it in her carry-on all the way from Colorado. We found a Mexican bakery for conchas and borrowed sarapes from our extended family to drape over the cascading tiers. Before the memorial, I had scanned family photos that we had taken from my grandmother’s old apartment to put together a slideshow that ran in the background. The actual photos covered the altar, interspersed with tamales, candles, and paper butterflies. We invited our family and friends to bring photos of their deceased loved ones to the memorial to place on the ofrenda. By the end of it, we could hardly find space to add more. 

Post-memorial, when the end of October came around, I built another small ofrenda in memory of my grandmother. That was also the first year I learned how to make mole from scratch. Since then, it has become another part of my annual tradition. 

In a previous blog post, I talked about how mole is so much more than a meal – how it has provided opportunities to connect with friends and family, helped me to celebrate my heritage, and afforded me a medium for remembrance and reflection. This year, mole continued to play a part in that tradition, but it also provided me something else that many of us have needed in recent weeks: comfort. 

The day after the presidential election, I was in a haze. It felt insane to be going through the motions when the world around me was falling apart. At the end of the day, even figuring out what to eat felt simultaneously trivial and impossibly overwhelming. Fortunately, I didn’t need to – a jar of mole sauce sat in the fridge, leftover from the weekend. Sitting down to eat a home-cooked meal that required minimal effort provided me comfort in a moment when I felt defeated and hopeless. And while I know that it is not a cure-all and that the future will hold innumerable challenges and that there is so much we have to fight for ahead, it is comforting to know that something as simple as a recipe can be a powerful, grounding force. 

In that previous blog post, I also alluded to the idea of a mole-inspired cookie. Abi Balingit’s technique of infusing traditional adobo flavors into a chocolate chip cookie felt like something that could be applied to some of the components in mole: ancho chile, star anise, and sesame. So, I decided to try it. 

Similar to Balingit, I infused the butter as it browned. Instead of bay leaves, however, I added dried chilies, ancho and arbol, and star anise, both ingredients found in the mole recipe I make every year (Rick Martinez’s Mole Sencillo). 

I knew, however, that just infusing the butter wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to make sure that the mole flavor was prominent. This is where I drew inspiration from another viral cookie recipe: Eric Kim’s Gochujang Caramel Cookies. Kim takes an extremely spicy, savory chili paste (gochujang) and adds butter and brown sugar to transform it into a caramel that can be swirled into sugar cookie dough. Mole also comes in a paste form: a concentrate that you can add water or stock to at home to transform it into a full blown sauce with little-to-no effort. This is actually the version of mole I am most familiar with – my mom preferred to doctor-up store-bought mole sauce as opposed to the laborious task of making it from scratch. 

I mixed mole paste, butter, and brown sugar into a “caramel” that I then wove into the chocolate chip cookie dough, folding it in unevenly so you would get pockets of spicy, savory, and sweet mole throughout. I made each cookie extra large using an ice cream scoop, and topped each with sesame seeds (another common mole ingredient) and flaky salt. 

The result was exactly what I had hoped for. Each cookie was unique – wrinkly with pools of dark chocolate and swirls of red-brown mole paste, topped with bright white sesame seeds. The flavor was complex – rich and decadent with a savory heat throughout. It was distinctly a mole chocolate chip cookie. Comforting and nostalgia-inducing.

savory-ness (1-5)	3 – sweet, spicy, savory
weird or works? (complimentary flavors or a little bit weird?)	works!
savory ingredient highlights	mole paste + ancho chili + brown butter
best served…	on your ofrenda
encore?	mole all the way!

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Mole Chocolate Chip Cookies

Mole, a traditional Mexican sauce featuring chilies and chocolate, is the star of these brown-butter chocolate chip cookies. Ancho chilies and star anise are infused in the butter and dark chocolate chunks + a mole “caramel” are weaved into the dough so that each bite has the right balance of bittersweet heat. 

Makes 12 large cookies 

Kitchen Equipment 

• Cookie dough scoop or ice cream scoop – helps you portion out the dough so each cookie is the perfect size 

Ingredients

• 2 sticks butter
• 1 dried ancho chili (I added a few chili de arból as well – you can also use guajillo or pasilla chilies!) 
• 1 star anise
• 1 cup packed dark brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 1/4 cups AP flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 10 oz dark chocolate, chopped
• 1/4 cup mole paste (concentrate) 
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
• Sesame seeds
• Flaky salt

Instructions

1. Brown the butter on a stove top. Add the dried chilis and star anise to the butter so their flavors infuse into the butter as it browns. Pour the brown butter into a heat-proof bowl to cool and remove the dried chilis + star anise. 
2. Whisk in the dark brown sugar and granulated sugar until fully combined. Whisk in 2 eggs and the vanilla until the mixture has lightened slightly in color and is fully emulsified. 
3. Whisk together the baking soda and flour. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until fully combined. Fold in the chopped dark chocolate. 
4. In a small bowl, combine the mole paste, softened butter, and brown sugar. Add dollops of the resulting paste to the dough and fold into the dough unevenly. Do not overmix. You want there to be ripples of the paste throughout the dough. 
5. Using a 2.5 oz cookie dough scoop or ice cream scoop, portion out the dough. Top with sesame seeds and flaky salt. 
6. Arrange the dough balls on a baking sheet so that they have at least 2 inches of space between them. Bake the cookies at 350ºF for 10-12 minutes or until slightly puffy and browned on the edges. When you take the cookies out of the oven, slam the cookie tray down on the counter to create a wrinkly texture on the surface of the cookie. Let cool before eating. Savor and enjoy!