TWD: Midnight Crackles

Woohoo!  Starting off on the right foot this year by baking and posting in time for the round up! 

This week for the TWD 3-year anniversary, the founder of our fabulous baking group: Laurie of Slush and her amazing helper Julie of Someone's in the Kitchen chose the Midnight crackles from p 74 of Baking from My Home to Yours. 

With the new weight loss goals, I halved the recipe, and only baked 2 cookies to try for some built-in portion control.  I think I'm going to go ahead  and roll out the rest of the dough into balls and freeze them so I can have a cookie or two when "needed" but not worry about a huge plate of cookies tempting me!

These cookies are really quite easy to whip up--I always like anything that doesn't require waiting for butter to soften (I always go too far when trying to do it in the microwave).  But I had a bit of a goof when adding the dry ingredients to my mixer, I accidentally turned it to high rather than low and had a flour/cocoa/spice explosion all over the place!

Oh well, it's not like the kitchen was super clean so it just inspired me to get to cleaning a bit faster!!

I baked up my 2 cookies this morning, and either did not let the dough soften enough or baked them for too short a time b/c they were not exactly crackly...  Oh well.  They were still good.  I don't know how I feel about the chocolate/spice combination either.  It confuses my mouth I think but I really enjoyed my 2 cookies warm from the oven :). 

Happy anniversary to all my fellow TWD bakers, and thanks so much to Laurie & Julie for all your hard work managing this book, and of course to the incomparable Dorie Greenspan who has made all of us better bakers!

(go here for the recipe)