Mar 03 2008
Seeking solace in chocolate
Sometimes you have to admit defeat and invite friends for tea and cake.
- Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies
As any of your that read my (other) blog or Dougal’s will know, we are currently flat-hunting (with a view to buying) and it is getting us down. I won’t explain why; there is quite enough navel gazing going on at the aforementioned sites and it doesn’t generally relate to food. However, last night we were both feeling so fed up of being perturbed and of thinking of nothing but flats flats flats that we decided to invite Na and James over for tea and cake to occupy our minds for the evening.
The Totally Chocolate Choccy Chip cookies seemed ideal as they were even from the chapter entitled Instant Calmer. A big pot of tea (three bags of Clipper tea, one bag of Equal Exchange Earl Grey) and a milk jug and some leftover sticky chocolate gingerbread…and not too much talking about flats. It helped.
The cookies were pretty amazing. Dead moist. I liked the measuring out with an ice cream scoop idea; I always feel a bit overwhelmed being asked to make 12 equal sized portions from a big bowl of mix and having a set measuring device helped. In the end we had more like 14 (or was it 16) cookies but they were by no means too small. I took advice and froze half, so that we are now only ever 19 minutes plus hardening up time away from more chocolate nom.
My only change, for next time, would be to halve the salt. I don’t mind a little salt in a cookie, I think it is important, even, but these were a little on the salty side. Also…350g of chocolate chips is a lot. We had 325g and you get several in every mouthful. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a crime to cut down on these. Although I suppose you might have to rename them Fairly Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies which might not cut it.
I took one to work today, and bought a 200ml bottle of milk (full cream, it’s all there was) to have with it. The combination was perfect. And as my mother will tell you, I don’t like milk.
Hmm you know, I just don’t know what I did to make my cookies turn out so *wrong*. The only thing I can think of is that I used chocolate with a very high cocoa percentage (I think it may have been 80%), and that might have made them too bitter. Anyway, yours look great!
Hmm. Our chocolate was 70%. But maybe it was lacking the bitter taste of capitalism (it was Fairtrade). Could you have over salted? I felt hers were over salty, so if you’d over done it a little too….blech..
I made these cookies today, well over a year since last time (and in my lovely kitchen in our lovely flat, how times change) and they were scrummy. But as i tried one, I thought, yuk, too salty, and went back and altered the recipe to half the salt content. If only I’d re-read this post first- or for that matter, amended the recipe at the time, twit.
On a similar note, D and I have a new system. If ever we are cooking a recipe where there are lots of ingredients going into lots of different bowls and it’s not clear which bowl needs to be the biggie as there’s where everything will end up….we underline the mention of that bowl in the recipe. So you can see. Big bowl goes here.