Try as you might, you will not break my spirit, Martha Stewart chocolate gingerbread cookies!

Because I was behind in the Pants Off Cook Off schedule, I decided to make both Week 4 (cookies) and Week 5 (greens) in the same night. This constitues more cooking than I have ever done at one time. Look at all them ingredients! (I'll talk about the greens in another post, which is appropriate because, SPOILER ALERT, I ended up eating them on a different night.)

For the cookies I picked Chocolate Gingerbread cookies from the Martha Stewart Living cookbook:

7 oz best quality semisweet chocolate

1 1/2 cups plus 1 tablespoon all purpose flour

1 1/4 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1 tablespoon cocoa powder

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup packed dark-brown sugar

1/4 cup unsulfered molasses

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 cup granulated sugar

These ingredients are more complicated than your standard Tollhouse Chocolate Chip cookies, but I chugged along: chopping chocolate into 1/4 inch chunks; mixing together the flour and spices; beating the butter, grated ginger, brown sugar, and molasses; dissolving baking soda in 1 1/2 tsp very hot water; beating half of the flour mixture into the butter mixture; beating in the baking soda mixture; then beating in the rest of the flour mixture, and mixing in the chocolate. Kind of a PIA, but it seemed to be going OK ...

Until I finished the batter and tasted it, and noted that it was not very flavorful given all the spices, and EXTREMELY buttery. That's when I re-checked the ingredient list and realized that I had more than doubled the amount of butter that it called for, by using the amount called for in the next recipe over (2 sticks plus 1 tablespoon).

Christ. The reasonable thing to do might have been to throw it out and start over, but I had grated ginger and such, you know? So I decided to double the recipe instead. Re-grating ginger, re-grinding cloves, re-heating water to mix with baking soda. However, since I had already used all the butter, on Batch #2 I could not really follow the standard cookie procedure of beating the sugar and butter together and then beating in the separately-mixed dry ingredients. I also couldn't use the mixer after I mixed the second, butterless batch of batter into the first, extremely butterly one, because I'd already added chocolate chunks. Ugh.

Only after this saga was complete did I notice the last sentence tucked quietly into the end of Paragraph 3 of the instructions: "Pat the dough out to about 1 inch thick; seal with the wrap; refrigerate until firm, 2 hours or overnight."

Godammit, Martha! It was already 10:30 pm at this point. Into the fridge went the batter, looking like something 14-year-old boys might have set on fire and left on your porch to show they liked you, or maybe hated you. I kind of wanted to cry.

* * *

OK, but the story ends happily. The next day I got the (now rock-hard) plastic-wrapped poop out of the fridge, rolled it into balls, rolled them in sugar, and baked them at 325 for 10-15 minutes "or until the surfaces crack slightly." The sugar made them attractively sparkly, and the combination of gingerbread-brown and chocolate-brown was very appealing visually. And they tasted good! I even brought some to work and got several seemingly genuine compliments on them. They were quite spicy, but the chocolate saved them from being too intense. The only problems were that I hadn't ground up the cloves quite enough, so some of the cookies contained nearly whole cloves, and similarly I didn't pick out all of the little stringy things from the grated ginger, so some of those were visible in the finished product.

I would make these again, although I'd buy ground cloves and chocolate chunks, and try to use the right amount of butter the first time.