Miraculous Morning After Cookies

Makes: 20 cookies
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: around 9 minutes
Skill level: Easy as falling off a bar-stool
Equipment:  food mixer / large spoonerism

From as far back as I can remember I have enjoyed chocolate chip cookies with a glass of milk. Mum baked them from a recipe in a Be-Ro flour cookery booklet at a time of my life when the most pressing issue seemed to be whether you were left with milk in the glass after the cookie was gone or whether there was still cookie to be consumed after the milk glass was drained. Invariably it would lead to countless toppings-up of milk and additional cookies. Before long I was following the fail-safe recipe myself with a frequency that makes me wonder why I wasn't a more portly youth and I continued to bake them when I went to university. Which is when the miraculous morning after cookies made their first appearance.
It was in a year of University life where I had enjoyed the second year of my degree so much that I had the need to do it again and in a bid to remove the temptation to go out on the town every night with house-mates, I elected to live in a flat on my own. This was very successful from a culinary point of view, because I had a kitchen to myself - complete with a magic socket, but more about that another time - but less successful with regards to knuckling down to work thanks to the advent of the more affordable mobile phone contract:
BEEP-BEEP Pub?
It was on my return from a rather heavy night that I stumbled into my flat and into bed via the kitchen.
The following morning I rose, a little less than bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and padded into the kitchen.
As far as I could tell, I had returned the previous night and had a bit of a fight with a bag of flour, looking at the state of the kitchen, but there, amongst the snow-scape and unwashed kitchenware, was a cooling rack of chocolate chip cookies. I had no clear recollection of baking them, but they were infinitely better than any I had baked before. A magnificent restorative they seemed to be, but the only fly in the ointment was that I had no clear recollection of what I did to make them so good.
Over the next few weeks I tried varying the recipe with different amounts of this and that ingredient, shorter cooking times or lower temperatures but to no avail. It was some time later that I figured out what I had done. It was down to the lazy cack-handedness of a drunk student. The quantities were the same, but out of laziness I had used a food processor to chop the chocolate into chips at the same time as using it to mix the dough and over chopped the chocolate to fine grains that melted into the cookies on baking, making them more moist.
The following recipe is not that of the original Be-Ro flour booklet, but rather improved in my opinion and not just indicated as a restorative for self-inflicted alements but great for a little comforting treat too.

Ingredients

100g chocolate
100g butter
100g demerara sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
200g self-raising flour

Method

Get rather relaxed with your favourite mood fixer. (Optional step)

Break the chocolate into chunks and place in the food mixer fitted with a rotating blade then blitz until the chocolate is broken into small pieces.

Add the butter and sugar then blitz again.

Add the egg, vanilla extract and the flour then blitz to a dough.

Shape 20 balls of dough on a greased baking sheet and bake for about 9 minutes at 180 C, Gas Mark 4

Remove from the oven and leave to stand for 5 minutes to firm-up before transferring to cool on a wire rack until peckish or conscious.

Serve with a glass of milk and suitable analgesia p.r.n.

Note: Best left to cool completely before eating, as this gives the best texture to the cookie.



In video form with some variation: