I’m not much of a baker, and I tend to stay away from baking sweet goods, but these cookies are way too easy and awesome to not give a go. I made them on a lazy Sunday with my friend Ruba, and I have to thank her for introducing me to this delicious recipe (although I don’t want to thank her too much as they are too damn addictive).

It’s a recipe slightly modified from 101 Cookbooks (and originally sourced from David Lebovitz’s Great Book of Chocolate). Based on Ruba’s experience in making these cookies countless times we decided to halve the quantity of sugar in the batch we made today, as the original recipe can cause a bit of sugar overload.

These cookies are wonderfully nutty and I think best enjoyed  still slightly warm from the oven, when the chocolate is warm and gooey.

Ingredients

1/2 cup brown sugar

115 grams butter

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla essence

1/2 tsp bi-carb soda

1 1/4 cups white flour

1 1/2 cups chopped dark chocolate

1 cup chopped walnuts

Recipe

1. Preheat oven to 150 degrees C.

2. Beat the brown sugar and butter together until smooth. Mix in the egg, bi-carb soda and vanilla essence. Stir though the flour, then add the chocolate and walnuts.

3. Shape the dough into balls by hand, they do expand considerably so keep them about 5cm. Place them on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. Make sure there is plenty of space between the balls.

4. Bake for 17-20 mins. The balls should collapse and produce flattened cookies (although today we did need to flatten them slightly with a spatula as they were cooking). Take them out of the oven when they are brown on top, they may appear to be too soft at this stage but they will harden as they cool.

Makes about 20 cookies.