finger-scrapin' good.

I've mentioned Josh's affinity for chocolate. When I started cooking, I tried making chocolate desserts for him so that I could find one that would cause him to give me his heart such that I could keep it in a little jar under my bed. I tried cakes, cookies, brownies, pies, lots of things. He liked everything, of course, because there is nothing made of chocolate that he does not like. But I wanted to find the thing that he loved, that he craved, that he asked for on his birthday. I searched for the perfect texture, the perfect moistness, the perfect pairing with a glass of (chocolate) milk.

That was silly. I should have just looked for the thing that stuffs the most chocolate in. I made a flourless chocolate cake that he liked, but it sorta caved in. He still ate it happily, scraping his finger across the bottom of the pan in a way that his very proper mother would be embarrassed to see (My mother, on the other hand, would tell him to move over so she could get her own finger in there). I guess I would have tried the cake again if I hadn't found the cookies.

The Raleigh News & Observer runs a column every Wednesday where they get the recipe of a specific dish from a local restaurant at the request of a reader. One day, it was a fudgy chocolate cookie. I cut out the recipe and brought it home to try for my chocoholic. It was a great success in terms of taste, though there was still a lot of finger scraping. I've since made it twice more, and I think I've figured out how to make this recipe into cookies that you can pick up and serve on a plate, rather than something that has to be eaten with wet and sticky fingers (or a spatula, if you have company).

Here is the News & Observer article, or if you want to cut right to the chase, here's a direct link to the recipe.

My changes:
1. I up the flour to 1 cup. They're still very fudgy, but it makes it a little easier to get them to act like cookies, instead of The Blob That Was Really Delicious.
2. I bake these on an Exopat, one of those fancy silicon baking mats. After baking the cookies, I almost immediately pull the Exopat off the cookie sheet and onto a counter to cool them off quickly. Then I put the Exopat, cookies and all, in the fridge for ten minutes or so. You really have to cool them down to be able to get them off that mat in one piece, because the melted chocolate acts like delicious glue. You're still going to get some chocolate residue on the mat, but you'll at least be able to serve them to people who are too embarrassed to go with their instincts and scrape their fingers along the baking mat.
3. Despite that helpful note at the bottom of the recipe, I use whatever chocolate chips I have, usually Aldi brand, though sometimes Hershey's or Nestle. I'm sure it's positively amazing if you use expensive high-quality chocolate. I hear they're good with Dom Perignon, too. But at the rate my boyfriend would like to eat these, I would like to be able to oblige him and still pay my mortgage.

These are Josh-approved, due to their very high chocolate-to-other-ingredients ratio. I get very sleepy after just one of them, and once they made my brother want to drink a beer. I'm not sure what that means, but it seems significant somehow.