Several recipes in the March Delicious caught the librarycook’s eye. But in the end, it was always going to be the Chocolate*, Sour Cherry and Rye Brownie Cookie that would take the cake and be featured in the highly esteemed librarycook blogpost.
Begin this recipe a day ahead, said the instructions, thereby providing, technically, a whole 24 hours of valuable reading time. Off to a good start right there, thought the librarycook. Half the dough could even be frozen for later use, should you inexplicably not want to make the whole batch at once.
And so to the ingredients list. Chocolate, check. Rye flour, baking powder, dark sugar, vanilla, milk chocolate chips, walnuts, check. But six eggs? There were two remaining chez librarycook, who thought, make a whole extra trip to the shops, or just use those two? Regular readers will know which choice the librarycook made there. And finally, dried sour cherries. The librarycook has been down this particular path of heartbreak and despair for an earlier, also chocolate-based, recipe. DSCs appear all but unobtainable here in Sydney. So the librarycook did what she has done before, and used dried cranberries instead. Whether the cookies would have been better with cherries, and with the addition of four further eggs**, will never be known.
24 hours later, the librarycook was back at the kitchen bench, ready and eager to get those cookies baked. She retrieved the dough from the fridge. Preheated the oven. Slightly dampened her hands, ready to divide the dough into 32 embryonic cookies. And was faced with something only slightly less giving than granite. Clearly, the dough was going to need serious out-of-fridge time before any baking could be begun.
Finally, a whole day later, the librarycook could get those babies out of the bowl and onto the baking tray, sprinkled with sea salt flakes, and into the oven. And just 15 minutes later out they came. Delicious. Slightly chewy. Sweet, sour and salty all at once. A 10/10 on the deliciousness scale. As to the cooking/reading ratio, it’s hard to score. Should the initial 24 hours in the fridge count? What about the extra time in the fridge, and then the couple of hours on the benchtop, waiting as the dough got malleable enough to be dealt with by human hands? The librarycook could probably work out some kind of rough guesstimate of the C:R ratio, but there are books to be read, after all.***
*Chocolate is one of the librarycook’s major food groups.
**Luckily, the librarycook’s Irish grandmother isn’t with us any more, or the mere reading of the words “six eggs” would have sent her to an early grave. She didn’t come through the Great Depression to be squandering eggs, willy-nilly.
***Currently, the librarycook is making her way, slowly, through a could-easily-double-as-a-weapon brick of a book called, aptly, The Absolute Book, which she is loving, but which has been temporarily put on hold by Ben Aaronovitch’s False Value, the latest in the very entertaining Rivers of London series. Police procedural meets Harry Potter, what’s not to love?
