Mushroom Cookies

I remember consoling myself when I found out that Father Christmas wasn't real, that at least there was still the Tooth Fairy. Then when Mum told me, in the same breath, that, actually, she wasn't real either (the Tooth Fairy. Of course my mum is real!), I was really fraught. All this took place in the bathroom by the way. Strange, the details you remember. She had yellow rubber gloves on and was cleaning. Again, my mum, not the Tooth Fairy.

The biggest shock of them all though, which has haunted me for a great many years (and get ready if you don't know, 'cause this is big), was discovering that BETTY CROCKER IS NOT REAL.

I know. I'm sorry. The shock. The horror. But it's the truth. You need to face it. On the bright side, there's a bad joke in there somewhere: 'What do Santa, the Tooth Fairy and Betty Crocker have in common?' Ha.

I just didn't get it. How could nobody write the greatest cook book in the world?

That's this book, unless you didn't know
where I was going with that... And that's a first edition!

I don't want to dwell too much on the negatives; we must pull ourselves together. The fact is, you still get Christmas presents without Father Christmas, the money for teeth has kept coming to all the children in my family with or without fairies, and you can still bake Betty's cookies, even if someone else wrote the recipes for them because Betty herself was just made up by cold and calculating company executives.

Now, quite aside from reminding ourselves that there is no Santa, all of this is very seasonal. Honest! My Mum had Betty Crocker's Cooky Book when she was younger, and now I have it (one word: Theft). And there's a recipe that I have wanted to make from it for years and years and years. And years. It is for Chocolate Crinkles and it is on page 23, right next to the recipe for Snickerdoodles, which we made lots when we were children.




Now you may ask why I haven't made these cookies before. Well, there are two reasons. And here they are:

1. The recipe makes 6 dozen cookies! That's about 3 million more than I need.
2. The recipe contains vegetable oil. That's fine for carrot cake, but the idea of using it cookies makes me feel a bit sick. Tell me you don't feel the same.

But then recently, when I was looking through the Cooky Book, it occured to me that if you are the type who makes cookies to give away at Christmas (and I am), having 6 dozen of them made in one sitting is pretty good going. You can see where this thought led.

But there was still the problem of the icky-sicky vegetable oil. What to do? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here's what I did: I allowed myself to be inspired by Betty 'I'm not really real' Crocker, but decided to see what Martha 'I'm real and can be held accountable if the cookies are horrid, just like when I was held accountable for lying about a stock sale and had to go jail' Stewart had to say on the subject. Turns out that Martha makes the same cookies, only she adds more chocolate (hurrah), doesn't use oil (swell) and calls them 'Chocolate Crackles' instead (not sure about that one).

This is irrelevant though, because I have named them Mushroom Cookies. This is because when we were making them, Mr. Other P, who sometimes joins me for a bit of kitchen ker-plutzsky, especially when I offer to make him a Snowball if he does, said that they looked like mushroom tops. He was right; they do, and I am now dying to make them in different colours, so that they look like toadstools. Don't even try to tell me that you too don't want to see that. I will consider it my sacred duty to do so, and report back.

He has a point, no? Mushrooms.

Because it's the Season of Good Will and all that, I have taken it upon myself to metricate Martha's recipe (and alter it, slightly, to use the sugar that I had in the house). Consider it my gift to all non American cup-measuring mankind; just call me 'The Martha Metricator'. (I love Martha. She's fierce!)

I didn't get 6 dozen cookies by the way, but that's because I made them big. I think we got about 50. Cookies, not dozen. And they were chewy and rich and tasted GORGEOUS!

Mushroom Cookies

You will need:

225g plain chocolate
225g plain flour, sifted
30g cocoa, sifted with the flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
115g butter, at room temperature
225g sugar (180g muscovado sugar, 45g granulated white sugar)
2 eggs
80ml milk
granulated sugar
icing sugar

1. Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a basin of hot water. Allow to cool. Make yourself a Snowball. It's Christmas, and you'll want something to drink while making these.
2. Cream the butter and sugars until smooth and light. Then add chocolate and the eggs, and mix thoroughly.
3. Add sifted flour and cocoa, as well as the baking powder and salt. Add the milk. Mix well. Chill the dough for an hour or so. We left it over night. Don't worry. You can have another Snowball tomorrow.
4. Set the oven to 180°C. Line a baking sheet with parchment. Put some granulated sugar in a bowl, and some icing sugar in another.
5. Roll pieces of the dough into balls the size of a walnut, and then roll them first in granulated sugar and then icing sugar. Place well-spaced apart on baking sheet, and bake for 14 minutes.
6. Cool on a wire rack. Pack and give away, if you can bear to.