 
How about a chocolate cookie?
Fast, easy, chewy, rich and dark, subtly salty and heady with intense cocoa flavor. The single best chocolate recipe I know, and a treat equal parts basic and elegant.
These cookies can be ready in under a half hour, provided you have whippable room-temperature butter and eggs [both can be remedied if straight from the refirigerator in a lukewarm water bath; seal butter in plastic wrap and be particularly careful not to use water that is too warm]. The ingredient list is brief and consists of items you are likely to always have in your pantry.
INGREDIENTS
generous half-cup butter, left at room temperature for several hours or overnight
very generous half-cup sugar [almost 2/3 cup]
one egg
small splash of vanilla extract [structurally optional; experiment with other extracts or spirits in small quantity]
quarter-cup flour
very generous quarter-cup cocoa powder
quarter-teaspoon baking soda
quarter-teaspoon salt
generous quarter-cup chopped chocolate of choice; half of a 100 g bar [dark complements the cocoa-dough best and scorches least; a variety with sea salt—pictured—lends depth and brings out the chocolate’s complexity; you can also use mid-sized to coarse salt crystals with plain chocolate for a similar effect; if baking for children you might want to use semi-sweet, milk or white chocolate and skip the salt]
METHOD
[1] Preheat the oven to 170°C. [2] Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy and beat in the egg and extract. [3] Place a sieve over another bowl and measure out the powdered ingredients. Mix thoroughly. [4] Combine wet and dry mixtures, blending well with a spatula-spoon and adding the chocolate last. [5] Drop onto ungreased parchment-lined baking sheets here’s a convectby the tablespoon, taking care not to crowd. [6] Bake one sheet at a time for 9-11 minutes, until edges of cookies are still very soft but feel dry to the touch. [7] Separate any cookies that have run together with a blade while still hot and cool on the parchment.
NOTE
The cookies will seem nearly soupy when warm, but will hold their shape after the intitial cooling. Store loosely wrapped in plastic or paper and eat within a couple of days. Or enjoy straight from the oven, while still hot and gooey, as a kind of upside-down fudge sauce, naturally topped with the best vanilla ice cream you can find.
ANOTHER NOTE
I have always used Dutch-processed cocoa to make these. Once, when I tried plain cocoa, they didn’t hold their shape at all. It’s all in the acid/alkaline balance between the cocoa and the baking soda, and typically recipes mitigate that through the inclusion of baking powder. But baking powder is an ingredient considerably less healthful than baking soda, and I don’t even keep it in my kitchen, so Dutched cocoa it is. [Ironically, it is considered a less healthful product than plain cocoa...]
FINAL NOTE
The recipe is my own, based on many initial experiments with a number of web-based formulae for chocolate-chocolate chip cookies, the sources of which I no longer remember.
THE LAST THING, REALLY
For another favorite cookie recipe, see my favorite gingersnaps. Happy eating, happy sharing!
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Uploaded on Nov 28, 2009
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We've decided to hang it over the Copenhagenese bed.
It was the first photo we took together, in what would become a recurrent collaboration: Dansker supplies the idea, I frame and record it. It was nearly four months ago, in Warsaw, back when breakfast meant something refreshing and berry-laden and served on the balcony. Dansker stuck the spoons upside-down in the striped yogurt parfaits and jammed them together; I grabbed a piece of white bristol and the camera and decided to leave out the subject, after all.
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Uploaded on Nov 17, 2009
38 comments
Found... found!
To someone else, or on another day, or had the other things been different, maybe it would have been merely a measured bit of luck, or a minor annoyance, or the satisfaction of an errand over. Instead, it felt like this:
Relief so great it was a kind of violence; the kind that comes in spasms and wails and pouring tears. Because what would have been had I gone all the way back to look for it and failed to find it? Because what if I hadn't bothered to go back, and then I would have had to deal with the disappointment of loss; I would have missed the thrill of feeling lucky; I would have missed the bigger thrill of being in control. Because here was what felt like my one victory in many weeks, and isn't that actually a tragedy; a mere thing, first lost then found in a shopping mall parking lot?
[I am struggling to think of a place more poetry-free than the shopping mall parking lot, and this may be why I cannot think of any other accounts of pivotal hysterics in shopping mall parking lots, but there must be women out there who will confirm that, whatever the pretext, out with the tears come all the other tears* in shopping mall parking lots. Surely, this is because shopping mall parking lots provide both the anonymity and the acoustics for a good cry. I also suspect that shopping mall parking lots do have their poetry, though it may be one so well camouflaged that only a hysterical woman is sensitive enough to discern it.]
*I am referring to the sparse and stinging tears of confusion and loss of control, and I will address them when I am ready.
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Uploaded on Nov 14, 2009
21 comments
The city that needs no introduction.
Part of something that might make a good series one day.
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Uploaded on Oct 1, 2009
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Map
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A phototext created for the Ink or Link? issue of Y Sin Embargo [#21].
Follow the link to browse or download the complete issue.
[With thanks to the amazing Fernando, who is, among many things, blissfully patient.
And more thanks to the wonderful Alicia for, among other things, the Spanish version.]
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Uploaded on Sep 26, 2009
7 comments
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