Chocolate Crinkles

I don’t know about you but I LOVE chocolate. To me, chocolate is ambrosial. It is the food of the gods. I am extremely humbled to have access to it.

Anyway, when my aunt and uncle visited us for the Christmas holidays in 2007, my aunt and I began to talk about my interests and I mentioned to her that I loved baking. She said she had been craving for moist chocolate crinkles — like the ones her other niece (not my cousin) made.

It was a rainy, cold day and no one wanted to go anywhere. I felt kind of bad for my aunt and uncle because I wanted something interested to happen to them every single day they were with us. I wanted to them to go some place or eat something interesting every day! So, I went online to look for a good chocolate crinkles recipe. I found Chocolate Crinkles II from Allrecipes.com and because the ratings for this recipe were pretty high, I thought I would give it a try! (Oops, I didn’t mean to rhyme!)

They turned out to be amazing! And they were easy to make. They were chocolatey, sweet but not too sweet and my aunt liked them so much I made them 3 more times before they finally said good bye.

Last night, while watching Jeopardy, I began to crave for something chocolatey like crazy! I wanted something baked… something warm and sweet that I could drink with a glass of milk. As I walked to the fridge, the printed page of the Chocolate Crinkles recipe caught my eye and I knew I had to make some.

As I had mentioned earlier, it is an extremely easy recipe. You most probably have all the ingredients at hand and if you don’t, you should go to the store and buy them right away! All the ingredients for this recipe are pretty cheap, too.

So, you begin by mixing together the wet ingredients. The mixture will be good enough to eat and you will be tempted but try your best to NOT even taste batter. Oh, and by the way, using a cool leaf-like bowl (which is actually a punch bowl and not a mixing bowl) is optional.

In a separate bowl, you will mix the dry ingredients. Remember to be careful when measuring stuff out. Baking is all about chemistry and proportions. When measuring stuff out, take a heaping spoonful/cupful of the dry ingredient and level it out with an icing spatula or even just a knife. Oh, and remember not to pack/press down flour! I don’t know why you shouldn’t do that but my Foods and Nutrition teacher told me not to and I haven’t done that since… and, I am proud to inform you, I haven’t baked anything that didn’t turn out well since.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and fold them in with a spatula. You don’t need an electric mixer for this. If I were you, I would gradually add the dry ingredients because that’s going to make your life easier.

Then — here’s the hard part — you have to chill the mixture in the fridge. Otherwise, the dough is impossible to work with and will just stick to your hands. However, I’ve never followed the recipe’s 4 torturously long hours recommended chilling time. I spread out the mixture on a couple of plates and I stick them in the freezer for 45 minutes and voila! The dough becomes possible to work with!

So you take heaping teaspoons of the dough and roll them out into balls before coating them with powedered sugar. Oh, and you can be creative with the coating. I’ve mixed powdered sugar with cinammon and those turned out to be delicious! Chocolates go very well with cinammon Then, you just have to stick them in the oven for about 11 minutes and after about 5 minutes of cooling (Oh, a minute is always good enough for me!), you can enjoy them. They should look like the cookies in the picture at the top of this post. They will be heavenly and you will understand why I think chocolate is the food of the gods.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this recipe. My mom (who highly disapproves of me baking because she thinks the goods I make are always just too unhealthy) actually requested for me to make her some of these. Now that means something.