Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies are maybe my favorite cookie from school lunch days. I was one of the kids that loved school lunch. I hardly ever brought lunch from home and really thought the hot lunch at elementary school was delicious. I used the recipe from inspired-by-chocolate-and-cakes.com. I've made a lot of chocolate crinkle cookies in my day and I particularly like this recipe because:

1) it uses cocoa (baking chocolate is a nightmare to find around here)

2) it uses butter and I love butter (a lot of the recipes use oil) and

3) it uses brown sugar (I like brown sugar)

Makes about 27 cookies. (I doubled the recipe and ended up with 54.)

Ingredients

Just over 1/2 cup (125g) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg white
1 1/2 cups plain flour

1 cup powdered (icing) sugar and 1 cup granulated sugar for rolling the cookie balls.

In a mixer, combine the butter, brown sugar, cocoa powder, soda and vanilla extract. Mix until smooth. The batter should be dark brown.

Add the egg and egg white and mix again.

Adding the eggs makes the batter lighter and also makes me want to eat the batter, then feel guilty and apologize to the unborn baby in my stomach for exposing it to raw eggs.

Add the flour and mix until fluffy. I'm kind of in love with how the batter looks.

Refrigerate the batter for two hours. (Or, if your fridge is like mine and there isn't room, then put it in the freezer.) The colder the dough is, the easier it easy to work with.

Heat the oven to 325 degrees F (160 C). Remove the chilled batter and make rounded tablespoons of dough.

Put the powdered and granulated sugar in separate bowls.

Roll the dough first in the granulated sugar and then in the powdered sugar. I like rolling in the granulated sugar because it make the cookies just a little bit crunchier on the outside and prevents the powdered sugar from absorbing into the dough too much.

Place on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove from the oven and let the cookies cool for about five minutes before using a spatula to lift each cookie. (Are you amazed I put in a tray of 12 cookies and took out one with 15?)