Chocolate Crack Cookies

With all this socializing I'm doing lately, Ready for Dessert may be less of a long-term project than I expected. Then I can move on to Dorie's Baking, which I finally broke down and bought. Mwa ha haaa! I guess word got out that if you invite me to something, I will bring sweets. That's fine--I'm not above buying friendship with sugar.

Matt's colleague invited us over to his pool for the evening. He's always exceedingly grateful and sends me thank you emails for any leftover desserts that I send to work with Matt, so I figured he deserved something that wasn't three days old for once. Chocolate Crack Cookies (pg 190) sounded good to me, because the title includes three of my favorite things. Just kidding about the crack part. Lebovitz named them for their appearance, not for any drug-related reason, though when he baked them back in his days at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, he had to come up with other, less offensive, names for them. I think his alternate of "baked chocolate truffles" gives a pretty accurate description of the finished product.

I need another hit.

These are small, one-bite cookies that are a little too easy to eat. They sort of melt in your mouth right until that millimeter before your teeth meet, when there is a slight crunch, because of the toasted almonds that are pulverized in with the flour. If there's one thing David Lebovitz knows how to deliver, it seems to be chocolate.

Conclusion: Love. It's like a brownie and a cookie had a baby.

I swear, I really did bake up a few dud recipes from this book before I started this blog. Everything I've made lately has been other-worldly good, but I definitely had my doubts about whether or not I'd keep this book at the outset. I just don't want to give the false impression that everything is flawless. The Nonfat Gingersnaps (pg 200) were inedible, and much to my mortification, I'd baked them as a gift, and had no time to make a replacement. Horrid. The Nectarine-Raspberry Upside Down Gingerbread (pg 41) was okay, but the flavors didn't really jive. Happily, I have many more unique recipes to try, so we shall see how it goes. If only I had an ice cream machine. There's an entire chunk of this book that I can't even touch. Sigh.