There’s a stretch of Highway 61 between Duluth and the Canadian border where you never lose sight of Lake Superior for very long. The north shore has been drawing people north for generations, for the water, the agates, the pines, the particular light bouncing off golden leaves on a clear October morning. And for a long time, it drew them to a weathered café just outside Two Harbors, where a woman named Betty Lessard was up at three in the morning making pie and donuts.
Betty’s Pies essentially started in 1956 as a fish shack that Betty’s father, Aleck, built by the Stewart River for a friend of the family to sell smoked fish from. Betty thought the fishermen stopping in might appreciate something sweet, so she added donuts and coffee. Then hamburgers. Then pie.
In 1958, Betty’s Café was born. It didn’t take long for word of the homemade food and the pies (oh, the pies!) to spread. By the time Betty sold the place in 1984, her café was as much a reason to drive the North Shore as the lake itself.
Betty Lessard was not a formally trained baker. She learned from doing and somewhere along the way, realized dessert was the most important part of any meal. She wouldn’t even plan a dinner party menu until she knew what she was serving last.
She got up at 4:30 in the morning to bake a hundred pies on Sundays, fifty or sixty on weekdays, along with rye bread and cookies. Everything from scratch, always. Butter, lard, real whipped cream. No shortcuts.
I stopped at Betty’s a lot with my grandma when I was young, and sometimes with my parents. We sat at one of the long picnic tables alongside strangers and had lunch and pie on our way up the shore. I don’t ever remember what we ordered, but I remember the feeling. It was the kind of restaurant that made you feel like you’d stopped somewhere special and that your taste buds were in for a treat.
Betty’s is still there, still drawing the faithful off the highway. Most North Shore regulars and locals will tell you without much prompting that the place was never the same without Betty’s guidance. The name remains, but the old feeling of the place is harder to find.
Which is why this recipe matters. These double chocolate cookies date to the Betty era, when she was still overseeing every recipe that came out of that kitchen. They’re a little taste of Betty’s, from the time when Betty’s was a Minnesota icon and customers asked for them by name, tucked them into bags for the drive home, packed them for hikes along the shore. My dad, a committed chocoholic, would like it on the record that he has already requested a second batch.
The recipe calls for something called Choco-Bake, which were envelopes of unsweetened baking chocolate flavoring that have since disappeared from grocery shelves. I found the substitution in a couple of old recipe Facebook groups after some digging. Regular cocoa powder mixed with vegetable oil does the job. The cookies are straightforward to make and turn out exactly as you’d hope—hearty, deeply chocolatey, stuffed with chips and nuts. My dad confirmed that they are packed with rich chocolatey flavor. High praise from an expert.
Double Chocolate Cookies
Ingredients
- 2¼ cup flour
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 cup butter, softened
- ¾ cup sugar
- ¾ cup brown sugar, firmly packed
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- 2 eggs
- ¾ cup cocoa
- 4 Tbsp. oil
- 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
- 1 cup walnuts, chopped
Instructions
- Pre-heat oven to 375°.
- Mix together oil and cocoa in a small bowl. Set aside.
- In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt. set aside.
- In a large bowl, combine butter, sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla. Beat until creamy.
- Beat in eggs and cocoa/oil mixture. Gradually add in flour mixture, beating well. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.
- Drop by teaspoonful onto an uncreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes.
