Chocolate Crackles

Before we make cookies: Millions of people in the US are losing food benefits. In fact, the Supreme Court just granted Trump's appeal to avoid paying food benefits, thus legally clearing the way for people to starve. 

If you are considering buying groceries to drop off at your local food bank, think about donating money directly to them instead. Food banks often buy food at bulk rates, so your money will feed more people than if you did the shopping yourself. And of course, the people in charge of food banks have a firsthand view of what foods are needed.

Right, on with the cookies...

Today, we are revisiting my ex's Italian grandmother's recipes! This one isn't particularly Italian, but it looked really good. Besides, cookies are always delicious.

Chocolate Crackles 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips 1 cup brown sugar ⅓ cup cooking oil 1 tsp vanilla 2 eggs 1 cup flour 1 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt ½ cup chopped pecans or hazelnuts Powdered sugar for rolling Melt chocolate. Mix in sugar, oil, and vanilla. Add eggs one at a time, beat each in well. Combine flour, baking powder, & salt. Add to chocolate mixture. Add more flour if the dough doesn't pull from the sides of the bowl when you stir it. Then mix in the nuts. Refrigerate until thoroughly chilled. When ready to bake, heat oven to 350°. Have greased or paper-lined baking sheets ready. Drop teaspoons of dough into a bowl of powdered sugar. Roll to coat. Place each onto the pan. Bake in 350° oven for 10 to 12 minutes. They should look a little underdone when you remove them from the oven. Carmella Oszterling

This recipe was perfect for this week's weather. The directions tell us to refrigerate the dough, and the days are still warm, but the nights are getting chilly. But it's still not cold enough for the heater. We must choose between jackets in the unheated house or sweating as soon as the furnace turns on. So we could mix cookies by daylight, and bake them without belaboring the air conditioning.

Apparently whoever wrote this was left-handed. The backwards slant in the cursive is a left-handed thing-- or so I've heard. (I'm left-handed and my cursive isn't tipped backwards. It's merely illegible.) 

Getting to the recipe, it's been a surprisingly long time since I've melted a bowl of chocolate chips. I forgot how magical and swoon-worthy they are.

We are next directed to add brown sugar (which is always welcome in our kitchen) and... cooking oil? Cooking oil? Like, the stuff you add to cake mix? After a few moments of angst, I set aside my "butter or nothing" purism because someone's Italian grandmother thought this recipe was good enough to copy down.

I really didn't think the recipe called for enough flour to turn this into a dough. And sure enough, after mixing it all together it looked like brownie batter. Which is fine if you want brownies, but I could already tell this would become runny melted dough splats.

I already knew these cookies would melt into sad splats in the oven, so I didn't bother baking them to find out. Instead, and with apologies to my ex's grandmother for going off-book, I added more flour until it seemed doughier. I figured that in the worst case, I would end up having to pre-flatten each one in my hands.

When you see how well the cookies came out, keep in mind that we dumped in a lot of extra flour instead of a delicate spoonful.

After a long succession of cookies that don't bake right without extra flour, I'm starting to think that perhaps I need to stop buying the cheapest stuff on the rack. In terms of grocery prices, this really isn't a good time to ditch store-brand. But we've been having runny cookies for a while now.

Having gotten the dough to look a bit better, it was time to add the walnuts! Of course, I hate walnuts so I used pecans instead. Pecans are a close relation of walnuts, and they are everything walnuts wish they could be. And if you prefer walnuts, you can simply let pecans go rancid. So pecans are dual-purpose, but walnuts can only ever be walnuts.*

After the temperature outside had dropped and the dough had chilled, it was at last time to bake. Because I don't trust cookie recipes these days, I baked a single solitary test cookie before risking a whole panload of them. The refrigerator had made the dough so stiff it bent the spoon, but we managed to force out one cookie's worth and coat it in powdered sugar.

Our white-powdered dough clod remained resolutely unchanged for most of the baking time. It didn't even melt or puff up. Then, just as I was ready to throw out the rest of the dough, our cookie burst out of itself and became beautiful.

 

I baked the test cookie just a smidge too long, making it ever-so-slightly hard. It turns out that with this recipe, you want to take them out of the oven while they still look a little underdone. I'm glad I didn't waste a whole dozen cookies finding that out.

After these cooled off, they were divine. They're like chocolate-pecan brownies. They reminded me a lot of the Tunnel of Fudge cake, which you may know as the recipe that put a bundt pan in every home. I wasn't worried about whether these would go stale. They wouldn't last long enough.

The recipe also makes a lot of cookies. I keep forgetting that Italian grandmothers don't do small batches, ever. Our cookie jar literally overflowed.

Keep in mind these are only the cookies that lasted long enough to cool off.

__________________________

*I've heard that walnuts are very good when they're fresh off the tree. And while I'm willing to keep an open mind, no one grows walnut trees anywhere near me.↪