Oh wait…I forgot.

Cookie-making season is in full swing! And I’m up to my ears. The library Christmas party is tomorrow, and I volunteered to bake cookies. I have no idea how many people work there, so I figured I should make two batches. And since I’m making two batches, why not make two different types of cookies? Yes! The original plan was to make a big batch of gingerbread mustaches, but I settled on ginger cookies (that’ll be my next post) and chocolate truffle cookies that I call Girl Crack Cookies because they’re ridiculously chocolatey. Somehow, I’m not a huge fan of them – maybe because they’re really intense, so you should eat them slowly, and I tend to cram cookies into my mouth like I haven’t eaten in a month – but I cook them for others on special occasions. Another perk: one batch makes a helluva lot of cookies. Seriously. A lot of cookies.

So! On to the makings.

First, do yourself a favor and gather your ingredients so you’re sure you have everything. Here’s what you need:

Next, melt the chocolate and butter. I use a makeshift double-boiler made out of a saucepan and a heatproof bowl. Simmer (don’t boil!) the water in the saucepan, and let the chocolate melt down slowly, stirring occasionally.

Next, use a stand mixer to whip the eggs and sugar until they’re thick and pale. As a default, whenever I’m told to do something with sugar (it usually involves butter), I turn the mixer to 6 and start a timer for 3 minutes. It worked:

After that, it’s time to our in the vanilla and melted chocolate. Yum!

Once that’s all nice and mixed, whisk together your flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt, then pour it into the mixer with the wet ingredients, and get everything nice and integrated. Then, add even more chocolate. Mhm hmm.

Stir that up, cover up your bowl, and pop it into the fridge for at least an hour. This dough isn’t quite as bad as the gingerbread dough, but it’s pretty hard to deal with when it’s not cold.

Once the hour is up, pull it out, and put small balls onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. I like these cookies to be small, so I use a small cookie dropper, which you can find in kitchen stores and, when you’re really lucky (which I wasn’t yesterday) Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Stick ‘em in the oven for about ten minutes, and you have lots of soft, intensely chocolate cookies. They’re not for the faint of heart!

Here’s the Official Recipe, which I adapted slightly from one on AllRecipes:

Girl Crack Cookies!

Ingredients:

Directions:

Most people find my blog by googling the title of a book and “review,” “summary,” or “paper.” They leave disappointed because my posts in no way resemble papers, contain half-ass summaries at best, and don’t talk about the books enough to be called reviews. I’m not sure what they should be called. Blurbs? My-general-reactions-to-the-few-notable-parts-of-books?

What matters to me is that people who don’t already know me generally don’t come back. Not that my ideal audience should be kids looking to cheat in school, either. I figured I’d take a new approach and add food to the books theme. At least for a bit. As an experiment.

Here’s how the idea started: My recipes are everywhere. I’ve been cooking for a few years, and since I’m bad at losing paper, I keep them in various apps and email. Note the various part. I was trying to find a recipe the other day, and I had to look through email, Evernote, and a couple iPad apps before I found it. I want to be able to find recipes when I want to use them, so I figured gathering them into one app was a good idea. After some researching, I settled on MacGourmet. I used it a few years ago, but since it doesn’t sync well with my various i-devices, I moved on. Now, though, I’m worried more about keeping recipes than having them immediately accessible, and I feel like my database is safest in the hands of good ol’ MacGourmet. It’s still an extra step for me, though, if I want to make something that’s not already on my iPad, specifically Pepperplate (which I love and would pay money for a non-webpage native Mac app) because there’s a bit of cutting and pasting involved. I can deal with that.

So! It’s Christmas season. Christmas is my favorite holiday behind Mardi Gras, and I really get into it. Around 2004, I was in a domestic phase, and I’d never made any serious cookies, so I tried my hand at gingerbread men, and they turned out awesome. I used Martha Stewart’s Basic Gingerbread Cookies recipe, which, at the time, I thought was a huge challenge. Now that I’ve done a bit of baking, it’s pretty easy. Maybe I was a bit freaked out by the sifting?

Here’s a (very unflattering) picture of me sifting the flour in my first attempt:

I’ve made the same gingerbread cookies almost every year since then. The funny thing is that, at that point, I didn’t have my Kitchen-Aid mixer, and I was about to say Don’t Try This with a Hand Mixer because I didn’t think they were powerful enough. This picture proves me wrong:

Ha! These cookies got much easier once my dad and stepmother got me a good mixer. Here’s the result:

On to this year’s cookies! For the first time ever, I’m branching out from traditional gingerbread men – into gingerbread MUSTACHES! I picked up a set of mustache cookie cutters in Houston a couple of weeks ago with these cookies in mind. And, since this is a food blog (post), I’ll show you how I did it!

First, you should head over to Martha Stewart’s site for the recipe. Or, of course, you can scroll down for my adapted recipe, which I think works better for smaller cookies.

First, I gathered all of my ingredients to make sure I had everything. I have a really bad habit of realizing that I’ve forgotten something when I’m already halfway through making it. Then I have to run to the store (which, thankfully, is less than a mile away), etc, etc. So, here’s the pile:

I combined the flour (all six cups of it!), baking soda, and baking powder in a big bowl with a whisk. You see the sifter there, but don’t use it yet even though Martha tells you to!

Then I creamed the butter and brown sugar in the mixer. The recipe says to use the butter at room temperature, but I just soften it in the microwave, and it turns out perfectly. And when any recipe tells me to cream those ingredients, I turn the mixer to six or so and set a timer for three minutes. Done.

That’s about what it should look like. Once it’s all creamy, add the egg and molasses. You’ll end up with a mess like this:

But it needs to be all liquidy since we’re about to put six cups of flour into it. Six cups!

So what about the sifting, you ask? Welllll, to avoid having to clean another dish (I live in an old house with no dishwasher!), I’ve started sifting straight into the mixing bowl. It doesn’t hurt anyone!

I add about half the flour at a time. This is the part where I didn’t think a hand mixer would cut it. Sometimes I’m surprised my stand mixer can deal with this stuff: the dough is thick. Here’s my mixer dealing with it:

And here’s what it looks like once it’s all mixed up:

So now that your dough is ready, you grab some Saran wrap, separate your dough into thirds, and wrap it up. I aim for one-inch-or-so discs. Pop ‘em in the freezer for an hour or so, and you’re good to go. Don’t skimp here: you want this dough to be cold because it’s hard to manage even then.

After an hour (or longer!), your dough should be nice and firm. Still, I usually open up a pack and break off half at a time, putting the other half back in the fridge to keep cool. Have I mentioned that this dough is hard to deal with?

Next comes the complicated part: get a nice fiancé who is willing to do the grunt work. This is a very important step in the cookie dough-rolling process, so don’t skip it. Spread lots of flour over your work surface, and roll out the dough. The recipe says to go for 1/8 inch, but don’t do that unless you want your cookies really hard. Then, start the cutting!

These cookie cutters have stamps on the top side to fill in some hair detail, making them the Most Awesome Mustaches Ever. Here’s the first sheet into the oven:

Last, but not least: the finished product!

These were lots of fun to make, and they’re not hard. It’s just a lot of them – like six or seven dozen. So keep some for yourself and give lots to your friends!

Thanks to Palmer for all of his assistance.

Gingerbread Mustaches!

Ingredients:

Directions: