So my day started off by making Chocolate Whopper cookies (doesn’t everybody’s?) to give to Karen Schiler and her boyfriend Steve who kindly picked me up from the airport in the pouring rain, flooded interstates be damned! I don’t have a double boiler, so I used my regular makeshift one. Someday I’ll get a real honest-to-God double boiler . . . . one can only dream. That Valrhona chocolate recommended is really amazing stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the reasons why the cookies were so good (but also super rich–they may not be for everyone.)Adjustments: Couldn’t find espresso powder or regular instant coffee (Ralph’s was a huge pain yesterday), so I used Vienna-style coffee powder, though the promise of a hint of cinnamon flavor made me nervous, but those hints went undetected in the final product, happily. Used the nuts I had in the house: about one and a half cup mixture of walnuts and pecans instead of the two cups the recipe calls for–I liked the reduced-nut version. There’s a typo in the recipe that appears in the book, which claims the mixture made 1 dozen cookies when it made double, but it’s been fixed on the linked website.

Assessment: Great for the chocolate lover and special enough to present as a gift. Also the perfect portable dessert for a picnic-type outing involving a bottle of red wine. I may very well bring these to my next Hollywood Bowl stint.
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