Brown Sugar Cookies

Got the new Cook's Illustrated last week and it had a great-sounding recipe for Brown Sugar Cookies. Who doesn't love brown sugar? And who doesn't love cookies? Will had just supplied me with some dark muscovado, a fancy high-end brown sugar grown on the island of Mauritius "on soil rich with volcanic ash." We decided to turn this recipe into an experiment to compare the dark muscovado to standard grocery store brown sugar. We split the recipe in two and did half with each kind. You can see in the pictures below that the dark brown sugar and the cookies made with it actually look pale next to the muscovado. The difference in the final product was substantial. The muscovado cookies had a lot more complexity of flavor; all kinds of weird spicy notes. The brown sugar cookies had a much simpler, sweet flavor. I much preferred the muscovado sugar cookies, but a lot of my friends thought the flavor was too much. I might try cutting it a bit with regular white sugar in the future, but I don't know if I can ever go back to regular brown sugar again.