Three Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies, Plus Chocolate

I observed passover for the first time this year. That means no flour (among other things). In previous years I've made the light and often fat-free meringues or the incredibly unhealthy and delicious toffee matzah crunch.

This year I decided to go somewhere in the middle, though I have to admit it's a mistake to think of these cookies as anything but rich. They have a little bit of protein, because of the peanut butter, but that's as much of a healthy glow as I can lend these four ingredient sugar bombs.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (gluten free)

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar*

1 large egg

1/2 cup chocolate chips

(*you can reduce this to 3/4 cup, if you want)

Mix all ingredients and drop by the tablespoon onto a greased or lined baking sheet. Bake at 375 degrees F for 6-9 minutes. The bottoms will start to brown. Be sure not to overbake, or it'll become crumbly. Don't worry too much. It'd still be delicious crumbs.

When I was putting together the dough, I really didn't expect these to bake into something that had the texture and sturdiness of a cookie. Somehow, they do.

Victory Over 'tashen

Last year, I knew it was purim when my roommate pulled out the crafting supplies and made glittery paper-plate party masks. He then mentioned something about a plan to drink until the line between good and evil blurs, and went off to purim festivities with his girlfriend.

And of course, I made busted hamantashen.

This year, I knew it was purim when my old catholic brother-in-law announced it on facebook.

So I took another swing at the poppy-filled cookies. These 'taschen were made with the citrus that I had on hand.

The poppy seed filling is optional. If you're hankering for something other than the nutty crunch of poppy, feel free to sub in your favorite homemade, or store-bought, jam or jelly. You could swap in chocolate spread. You could even use peanut butter and mini-marshmallows and make a strange fluffernutter.

Poppy Seed, Blood Orange Hamantashen
(adapted, gently, from Smitten Kitchen)

Poppy Seed Filling:

1/2 cup milk

1/4 cup sugar

Zest of 1/2 blood orange

1/2 cup poppy seeds

Juice of 1/2 blood orange

1/2 tablespoon orange liqueur

1/2 tbsp butter

1/4 tbsp vanilla extract, or seeds of 1 vanilla bean

Dough:

Zest of 1 lime

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 and 1/8 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 stick (4 oz) salted butter, at room temperature

1 large egg yolk

Egg Wash:

1 large egg, beaten

Make the Filling:

Heat the milk, sugar, zest, and poppy seeds in a medium-small saucepan. Cook at a simmer for about twenty minutes. The seeds should begin to plump up slightly. You won't be able to actually see the seeds expand, but you should notice less liquid sloshing around.

Add in the juice, liqueur, butter and vanilla (extract or bean scrapings). Continue heating gently for another ten minutes. Allow the mixture to cool slowly, and then refrigerate it to cool further. The slow cool allows the poppy seeds to suck up as much of the liquid as is possible.

Make the Dough:

In a medium bowl, combine the zest, sugar, flour and salt. Dump in the butter and egg yolk, and use a pastry blender to process the dough until it comes together to form a crumbly mass.

Process a bit more until it hangs together, and then press the dough into a flat shape, and wrap tightly in plastic wrap.

Refrigerate the dough for at least an hour.

Form the Cookies:

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Gently flour your dough-working surface (table or counter) and roll the dough out to about a quarter-inch thickness. If the dough starts to crack as you're rolling, don't worry. Just go slowly, allowing it to warm up as you work.

Use a biscuit/cookie cutter or small glass to cut out 2.5 inch rounds, remushing and then re-rolling the scraps of dough to make as many rounds as possible.

Move your dough rounds to your parchment-lined baking sheets.

Put a heaping 1/2 teaspoon of poppy seed filling in the center of each round, and then fold, don't pinch, three sides of the dough over the filling to form the traditional tricorner shape.

Beat your egg wash egg, and then use a pastry brush to apply the wash to the formed cookies. The egg wash is bound to redistribute some of the poppy seeds across the face of the cookie. Don't worry about it. It's... an extra decorative touch.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F, and refrigerate the trays.

In about ten minutes, pull out the trays, and go over the cookies again with another layer of egg wash.

Bake for about 10 to 15 minutes, until the cookies go golden.

Brown Butter Vanilla Bean Rice Krispie Treats (Vegetarian)

It rained for the first half of Saturday. Sunday was turning out to be a similarly colorless day, aside from a hour-long window of sunlight in the mid afternoon.

I wanted to make something simple for cookie monday. Something with, say... 3 ingredients.

Generally speaking, rice krispie treats are made by melting marshmallows. As is the case for a surprising amount of candy, marshmallows get their springy set from gelatin. Fluff, on the other hand, is pig-pectin free. When planning out my baking for the night, I knew I'd be subbing in fluff for marshmallows.

But, of course, once I got in the kitchen, I started making more changes. I browned the butter (cooking the butter until the milk solids turn all golden and start smelling nutty and rich).

Then, at the last possible moment, when the fluff and butter were melting together, I remembered my cache of vanilla beans, and scraped one into the mix. Once melted, the fluff was smooth and shiny, flecked with black vanilla beans, and brown bits.

Rice Krispie Treats

(Brown Butter and Vanilla Vegetarian Variation)
1/2 stick butter

8 oz Marshmallow Fluff

5 cups puffed rice

1 vanilla bean

First, plan your end game: grease a 9x13 inch pan, and put 5 cups of puffed rice into a big mixing bowl.

In a medium-sized saucepan, melt the butter. Cook over low-medium heat, stirring frequently. The butter will turn clear, foam, and turn yellow-golden, and then brown.

Just as the butter is browning, glop 8oz of marshmallow fluff (one small jar, or half of a bigger tub) into the saucepan. Stir frequently.

Scrape one vanilla bean pod out into the mixture, and cook for about five minutes, stirring. When the butter has been fully mixed into the fluff, and the mixture is smooth, pour it into the puffed rice filled mixing bowl and stir to coat.

While still warm, turn the mixture into your prepared pan, and pat it flat, and refrigerate until set.

You can store this at room temperature for about 2 days, or in the fridge for longer.

PPK Vegan "Milano" Cookies

I'm visiting my sister in Fishers, Indiana, and decided to make cookies for cookie monday, before flying back home tomorrow morning. My sister has a dairy intolerance, so we dove into the archives of post-punk kitchen for this week's contribution: vegan milano cookies.

I ended up making these a bit smaller than the traditional milano, and they came out crisper than would have been the case with more generously sized cookies.

Normally I'd post the recipe, but this one was unadulterated, just as written. I only have one note to add: although the PPK recipe warns of the dough being difficult and sticky, I had no problems handling the dough or patting out little ovoids.

Checkerboard Cookies

Today's recipe is a time sink. It's the perfect diversion to fill a the Sunday afternoon, when you're stuck inside because of the drippy, windy weather that was supposed to be a category 2 hurricane.

Checkerboard Cookies
(adapted in parts from Baking Obsession, Joy of Baking and Martha Stewart)

I adapted this from a couple recipes on the internet, using a bit less sugar than Baking Obsession, keeping the dutch processed cocoa and baking powder (these don't rise much, at any rate) and adding in lemon zest, so that the white squares have a citrus-y gusto that competes with the deep dark valrhona cocoa that I used.

You could vary the flavors and colors of your batch. (See the notes in the recipe.)

2.5 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
1/4 cup dutch processed cocoa powder
1 tsp lemon zest

To start, sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder.

In another bowl, combine the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl. Mix by hand or machine until the batter is light and fluffy. Once you've achieved a cloud-like texture that pleases you, drop in the egg and vanilla, beating well.

Add in the flour mixture, and stir until homogeneous.

Here's where the fun begins: Divide your dough in two. If you want to make the traditional black and white checkerboards you'll be adding lemon to one half, and cocoa to the other. You could also do this cookie with a few drops of different food coloring in each half, or different flavorings. (Coconut and lime might be a great choice.) The dough is a basic sugar dough, and it'll take almost any mix-in, from ground hazelnuts to instant coffee.

Knead the flavoring (in my case, lemon and cocoa, respectively) into your dough halves. Subdivide those portions (now you have four mounds of dough--two of each flavor) and wrap in plastic and chill for at least 2 hours.



















After the dough has chilled, take one portion of each flavor, and use parchment paper or wax paper to roll it out to a rectangle. You may have to play with the dimensions of your rectangle. Each of my rectangles was 9cm wide by 17cm long by 1cm thick. You're going to need to cut each of the two dough portions into 9 rectangular strips (1cm by 1cm by the length).


















I recommend chilling again after this step, to avoid breaking the delicate strips. Once the dough is firm again, start laying out your checkerboard. You'll be making two checkerboard logs.

Here's what the log will look like:
xox
oxo
xox

For log 1, use vanilla in place of x, and chocolate in place of o.
For log 2, use chocolate in place of x and vanilla in place of o.















Refrigerate the logs. While you have the fridge open, pull out the two remaining dough portions. Roll each portion out into a 17cm by 13cm rectangle. You'll be using this dough to wrap around each log and give it the nice uniform edge. 17cm is the length of each of my logs, and 13cm is the circumference of each log (12), plus 1cm to account for an inexact fit around the edges.

Once your dough is rolled out, pull out the log, and gently wrap the rectangles around their respective doughs.

Because each log is made up of an odd number of strips, there's a dominant flavor in the log. For example, log 1 has 5 vanilla/lemon strips and 4 chocolate strips. That log needs to be wrapped in the chocolate rectangle. Log 2 should be wrapped in the vanilla/lemon rectangle.

Refrigerate yet again. In fact, if you want, you can freeze this dough for up to 2 months before baking. Once the dough is very firm, and you're ready to go, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Use a sharp knife to cut the bar into 1.25cm-thick cookies. Bake about 12 minutes, until the bottoms of the cookies just start to turn golden.

raspberry poppy seed tart

Well, after the purim failure, I was left with a mess of poppyseed filling. I thought about trying the same recipe again, armed with egg wash and new knowledge (the internet says you have tofold the edges of the cookies, not crimp) but ended up going with something else.

This is a raspberry poppy rustic tart.

The incredibly high seed-to-any-other-ingredient-ratio means that this tart is crunchy and nutty--like eating the tiniest tastiest gravel bits in a flaky pastry crust.

with raspberries.

Raspberry Poppy Tart
(adapted in parts from Smitten Kitchen)
Crust
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons sugar, divided
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick plus 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
3 tablespoons ice water
1 large egg yolk mixed with 2 tablespoons of water

Combine flour, 2 tbsp sugar, baking powder, and salt, in a large bowl. Cut in the cold butter, and cut with two knives or a pastry cutter, until you have pea sized pieces.

Sprinkle the dough with ice water and mix briefly. (Don't overmix, This is pastry.) Knead the dough once or twice to get it together. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about a half hour.

In the meantime, prepare your filling.

Filling
Combine 1/2 recipe of poppy seed filling with 1 cup of frozen raspberries and two tablespoons raspberry jam. Mix well.

Roll out the chilled dough into an 11-inch round.

Spread the filling in the center of the dough and gently fold the edges up over the top, covering the outer edge of the filling. Brush the top of the tart with the egg wash, and sprinkle the remaining sugar on top. For best results, freeze the tart before baking. It should take 3-4 hours to freeze solid.

Bake directly from the freezer, at 375 F for about 75 minutes. The crust will be golden brown.

Try to avoid drug tests, and don't forget to floss.

Tiny 'tashen Fail

From what I've read, it seems like hamantashen--the three cornered hat of a purim cookie--are often ornery. Either the dough is too stiff and dry, or too delicate to hold shape. If I did these again, I'd try folding the dough, and sealing it with a bit of egg wash. These tasted great, sweet and flaky, but I ran into trouble every step of the way.

The recipe I used, from Smitten Kitchen, asks the baker to grind the poppy seeds. In her recipe, Deb gave the seeds a whir in her coffee grinder, since she didn't have a spice grinder. I don't even have a coffee grinder. So I had a go with a mortar and pestle. After a few minutes of grinding and spilling seeds all over the counter and floor, I gave up and dumped the whole seeds in the simmering pan of syrup for the filling.

Then there's the dough. This dough took so long to come together that I'm sure I overworked it before I had the sense to simply bundle it in plastic wrap and let time and refrigeration pull the ingredients together.

The filling settled into caramel colored strata in the fridge, raisins at the bottom, butter just above that, poppyseeds in a thick thick layer at the top.

I folded the dough into strong points, and chilled the cookies before baking, but several of them exploded out into puffy pastry circles with small poppyseed pyramids, fused into sugary mounds, hot from the oven.

Cranberry Ginger Oatmeal Cookies

I've been reading about how to develop recipes for baking. Dianne Jacob suggests pulling up a number of trusted recipes for the basic type of good that you're trying to develop (bread, quick bread, cookie, cake, etc.) and then filling out a grid with the ingredients for each recipe. That way, you'll have the right ratios--leavening to acid, for example.

I tried that out this past week with a new recipe for Cranberry Ginger Oatmeal cookies, using recipes from Martha Stewart, Smitten Kitchen, and the Food Network.

Hot and crisp from the oven, cranberries and lemon dominate this cookie. A day after baking, the ginger peeks through. If I made these again, I'd kick in a bit more ginger and maybe some cloves.


Cranberry Ginger Oatmeal Cookies
wet
1 stick butter
2/3 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1/2 tbsp vanilla
zest of 1 lemon

dry
1/2 cup white flour
1/4 cup white wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ginger

finish
1.5 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup dried cranberries



Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, combine butter and sugar. Beat in the egg, vanilla, and lemon. In a smaller bowl, mix the dry ingredients well. Add the dry to the wet, beating until incorporated.

Finish by adding rolled oats and cranberries (or any dried fruit bits. Apricot springs to mind as an interesting variation.) Mix until it looks vaguely homogeneous.

For the best results, refrigerate the dough for about 20 minutes before picking up and rolling out shooter marble sized spheres. Place the dough balls on parchment or foil-lined baking sheets and bake for 10-15 minutes, depending on how cold the dough is when you put it in the oven.

The cookies are done when the edges are golden brown. Don't be concerned if the middle still looks a bit less than firm. It'll solidify as they cool.

As with many cookies, if you store these in a closed container, the humidity will soften those perfect crisp edges. So these are best eaten the day of baking.

Brown Butter Banana Bread

If you come across some enfeebled, spotty bananas, but you don't have time to throw down a quickbread then and there it's simple enough to toss them into a freezer. But always, always peel them first.

I haven't made banana bread in a while in part because the last time I did, I tried to use bananas that had been frozen in their skins. I made a valiant effort at separating the stringy black mess from the pale yellow mess, but in the end the whole thing smelled (and tasted) sadly of rot.

Happily, today was unlike that day.

Brown Butter Banana Bread
adapted from Simply Recipes

4 ripe bananas
1/3 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar

1 tbsp ground flax seeds
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

Melt the butter in a saucepan or skillet. Once everything is liquid, reduce the heat and begin to stir, gently at first, and then with an increasing sense of urgency. The butter will lighten, and then darken, turning a nutty brown color.

Once it's brown, pour the butter out of the pan into a small bowl where it can cool until needed.

Mash the bananas in a large mixing bowl. Add the warm (but not hot) brown butter. Mix in sugar, vanilla and flax. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt on of the mixture and stir a few times. Add the flour, stirring just until incorporated.

Pour the thick batter into a baking pan (this will do a short bundt, 9 inch round, or a 4 x 8 inch loaf pan) and bake for about an hour. The cake is done when a knife inserted in the center pulls out clean.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti

I am strangely lazy when it comes to twice-baked goods. Give me fiddly little dough shapes to make, or chocolate dipped whathaveyou, and I'm happy to work away at it for a couple of unreasonably focused hours. But biscotti and shortbread both require a discomfiting combination of sporadic attention and accurate timing.



This biscotti isn't particularly traditional--I used both baking powder and soda, and the recipe doesn't have any ground nuts in it. What it does have is a deep chocolate flavor. (You can taste the peanut butter on the inhale of a bite, but it's not overpowering) And, importantly, this recipe withstood my haphazard baking rhythm.



Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti

Ingredients:
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup chocolate peanut butter (or nutella, or regular peanut butter)
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat eggs until frothy. Add sugar. Add peanut butter in by hand mixing. Combine (sift together) flour, baking soda and powder and salt. Mix. Add chocolate chips.


Form the dough into two or three logs, and place them on a parchment paper covered baking sheet. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, then pull the sheet from the oven, and reduce the temperature to 200. Using a serrated knife, slice the logs into biscotti shaped pieces. This may be difficult. I got through it by pretending I was a jigsaw machine. Lay each piece on its side.

Bake again (at 300 now) for 10-15 minutes. Stay on the short end of the baking time on this and the next step to create biscotti that retains a softer center.

Pull the sheet from the oven, flip all the pieces and bake again for 10-15 minutes.

Done. These are best enjoyed with a hot beverage and a long dunk.

Simple Italian Cookies

I narrowly missed getting doored by two flower delivery vans on the way in to work this morning, so it must be valentine's day. In honor of the occasion, I pulled together a batch of simple italian cookies--sometimes called Italian Love Knots.

I usually refer to these as cookie-biscuits. The dough isn't very sweet, and the cookies are firm a little dry. They get their sweetness from a citrus glaze that dries to a hard finish. I've made the glaze with lemon juice and orange zest in the past, and that's what I recommend, but I went with orange juice for this glaze. When you include the zest, it'll be visible in the glaze.

Simple Italian Cookies

1/4 cup butter (salted), softened

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 tsp orange extract

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg

1 egg white

1 1/2 cups flour (all-purpose)

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

Glaze:

Lemon Juice

Powdered Sugar

the zest of one orange

Directions:

Preheat the Oven to 350 Degrees F.

Mix the butter, sugar and extracts. Add in the egg and egg white. In another bowl (or your measuring cup) mix the flour and baking powder. Add the dry to wet, and mix until the dough comes together--it'll look crumbly, but it'll come together in the next step.

Pick up shooter marble sized pieces of dough and roll them between your palms until you have a long snake of dough. Knot the dough in any manner you please (suggestions include: pretzel, knot, heart, spiral) and place on a lined baking sheet.

Bake for 8-10 minutes. The top will be light, and the bottom will be slightly browned.

For the Glaze- Start out with two cups of powdered sugar, and add lemon juice by the teaspoon, mixing thoroughly after each addition, until you get a runny glaze. Add orange zest and mix. Wait for the cookies to cool before dipping them if you want a thicker glaze layer. If you're fine with a thin layer, dip while hot.

Crispy Mint Creme Cookies

I'm not sure how this happened. I was trying to bake a simple chocolate crinkle cookie base for a chocolate topped cookie that has a thin mint layer. But I ended up with something that looked and felt disappointingly like a full size version of cookie crisp cereal pieces--light and crispy where I was banking on having dark, rich, and chewy.

They didn't turn out bad. Just... not quite what I was looking for. On the bright side, the mint creme layer was brilliant. When I did this, I ended up with double the mint creme I needed, so I've adjusted the recipe below.

Mint Creme
(from Gourmet's peppermint patties recipe)

1 1/4 cups confectioner’s sugar

3/4 T Karo Syrup (or golden syrup)

3/4 T water

1/4 tsp peppermint extract

1/2 T shortening

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl, until they come together into a clumpy mess. Turn the bowl over onto a counter (preferably wax paper covered) and knead until the creme comes together. In its final form, it'll look almost like a marshmallow. (But it feels like fondant.)

Set it aside.

Crispy Cookies

Your mileage may vary here. I'm still not entirely sure what I did. But this is some kind of Mangled version of these, from Betty Crocker.

1/4	cup vegetable oil
2	oz unsweetened baking chocolate, melted, cooled
1	cup granulated sugar
1	teaspoons vanilla
2	eggs
1	cup all-purpose flour
1	teaspoon baking powder
1/4	teaspoon salt
8 oz	milk chocolate (for finishing)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F

Mix the oil, chocolate, sugar and vanilla. Add in eggs, one at a time, while mixing. Add in the flour, baking powder and salt. Once the dough starts to come together (mine never stopped containing grainy lumps of chocolate, go figure) chill the dough for as long as your patience will allow. For me, that's about 10 minutes, while I clean up ingredients and preheat the oven.

Once the dough is chilled, you can roll it into goopy ball-shapes and drop onto a parchment lined cookie sheet. Don't fret if the dough doesn't roll well. It will spread and smooth in the oven.

Bake for about 10 minutes--until the edges start to brown.

While the cookies bake, form small patties of mint creme. These will go on top of each cookie. You can form a pat by rolling a ball, and pressing down with the palm of your hand.

Once the cookies are out of the oven, press a mint creme patty on the top of each cookie, and wait for the cookie to cool.

Once cool, drizzle or drape chocolate across the top, sealing the mint and cookie together.

I ran out of milk chocolate before I was finished, and I ended up making the last dozen into mint creme cookie sandwiches. Here's what the chocolate-covered version looks like, in cross section:

Peanut Butter Blossom Buttons

Peanut butter blossoms--those nutty, chewy, cookies with a hershey kiss pressed into the top--have always been one of my favorite cookies. Unfortunately, they're also one of the hardest to pack up into a tupperware container and transport. The delicate tips of the kisses get knocked right off.

So it's time for a new take on the peanut butter blossom.

Meet the Peanut Butter Blossom Button.

Peanut Butter Blossom Buttons

(adapted from Hershey's)

Ingredients

Hershey Kisses (one per cookie)

3/4 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup shortening

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon baking soda

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

Demura sugar (for rolling)

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.

Beat the shortening and peanut butter in a medium mixing bowl until you can't see the white of the shortening. Add the white and brown sugars, and beat again until the mixture gets a little fluffy.

Add the egg, milk and vanilla.

Stir together Flour, baking soda and salt (I usually just do this in the liquid measuring cup. Saves on dishes) and add to the wet ingredients. Mix until the dough comes together.

At this point, pull out your mini muffin tin. Take pinches of the cookie dough and roll them into 1-inch(ish) balls. Gently roll the balls in the demura sugar, and pop each ball into a hollow on your mini muffin tin. No need to line it or grease the tin, the sugar should keep the cookies from sticking.

Bake for about 10 minutes. While the cookies are baking, unwrap the chocolates (one kiss per cookie). When you can see cracks form in the tops of the cookies, pull it from the oven. Press a kiss, point down, into each cookie. Once you've finished them all, go back and give each kiss a gentle tap to push it down a little further and cement the two together.

Put the pan back in the oven for another minute or so, then remove. Wait for the cookies to cool before tipping them out of the pan, so that you don't muss the chocolate. Or, if you're in a hurry or short on pans, you can use a butter knife to pop them out and let them cool on a baking tray or paper towel.

Wait for the cookie to cool completely before you pack it up.

Honestly, I think these look more like blossoms (think tulips) than the original ever did.

My recipe made about 42 cookies. Your calorie content may vary slightly, but here's how it came out for me.

A few specific notes:

Normal grocery store peanut butter works just fine for these. I used all-natural, fresh-ground, still warm, peanut butter purchased at my local organic hipstermart. But the shelf stable stuff is great too. Creamy will guarantee a perfect cookie, in my opinion, but you can use crunchy if you don't mind a little extra work while mixing.

And speaking of crunchy, I do recommend picking up some of the demura sugar--sometimes sold as raw sugar. It gives the cookies a rough texture that contrasts with the smooth chocolate.