"Did I tell you how much I love chocolate?"
Christina's Chocolate Cookies
Every now and then I love to indulge, especially on my days off from work. And as the weather gets increasingly cold (I am definitely not complaining), comfort food has definitely worked its way back into the Bentley household. A lot more roasted veg now than salads to say the least.
I loooooove chocolate.
So a few weeks ago on pay day, I headed down to the supermarket and bought all the ingredients needed for my seasonal chocolate treasures. I only make these a few times a year purely because if I made them any more often I'd have a few teeth missing - they are EXTREMELY indulgent. I can barely handle one cookie in one sitting, from the picture above you can imagine they come up quite big. But again, that's really not a bad thing...
INGREDIENTS
200g Salted Butter (Room Temperature)
300g Caster Sugar
1 Medium/Large Free Range Egg
280g Self Raising Flour
75g Cocoa Powder
Half a Large Bar of (your choice of) Chocolate
^I used 85% Dark Chocolate
I used
salted butter because of my choice of chocolate. Dark chocolate, although strong and rich in flavour, needs a bit of seasoning to taste it's best (salted dark chocolate anyone?), and the easy way of doing that in this recipe is to use salted butter. If using white or milk chocolate, you can use either unsalted or salted, as they taste pretty decent without the use of added salt. Of course, if you wanted to control the salt content of the cookies, use unsalted butter and add however much salt you think is necessary - I wouldn't use more than half a level teaspoon for this recipe.
METHOD
Start by creaming together the butter and sugar in a large bowl until light, creamy and pale in colour. Then add your large egg to the butter and sugar and stir in until fully combined. Sieve in your flour, cocoa powder (and salt) and stir until the mixture comes away from the sides and forms a ball. If slightly too wet, add 5g more flour, if too dry, add a bit of milk (any will do) and stir until you've reached the desired consistency. Break in your choice of chocolate/s and mix until it's evenly dispersed. Lastly split the mixture into around ten balls and place on a baking tray, about two inches apart (they spread like crazy) and put into a 200C/400F preheated oven for approximately 10 minutes. They will not look cooked when they come out of the oven, but you'll need to just trust the recipe at this point, and just leave them to rest for around 10 minutes before you transfer them to a cooling rack where they can cool further and set.
I enjoyed these cookies while watching the BBC's Doctor Foster (it was brilliant, sheer brilliance) with a green tea in my dressing gown, football shorts and cosy, fluffy socks.
How do you spend your days off?
Christina x
