Ginger Chocolate Chewy Cookies

Also known as third time lucky! And also phew-just-in-time! When Choclette published a recipe for chewy apricot cookies back in December I immediately decided I needed to bake them. They looked delicious and pretty much my idea of a perfect cookie. And then I pretty much went off the idea of baking altogether. (Yep, it's been a bit like that round here recently).

But when I decided that I needed cookies I remembered Choclette's recipe and how good it had looked and decided to make some. Please don't ask what happened to the first batch, and then whilst making the second batch I completely forgot to add the baking powder. So although they turned out ok, they were rather more chewy than I was expecting and I decided that third time's the charm and had another go. I halved the recipe and these went perfectly well.

I'm going to give the recipe here as this is how I made them after adapting the recipe slightly. You can find Choclette's original recipe here.

Ginger Chocolate Chewy Cookies
Ingredients
50g butter, softened
50g light muscovado sugar
15g honey (I used a floral New Zealand honey.... airmiles *cough*)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
75g plain flour
scant 1/2 tsp baking powder
30g crystallised stem ginger, chopped
30g 70% cocoa solids chocolate, chopped

Method

- Preheat the oven to 175C/Gas4 (ish). Line a baking tray with parchment paper.

- Cream the butter, sugar and honey together until well combined.

- Add the vanilla extract, flour and baking powder and continue to mix. The mixture will seem very dry.

- Add the chopped ginger and chocolate and work the mixture together. I used the back of a spatula for this and then ended up squashing it together with my hands.

- Divide into approximately equal balls, I got twelve from my mixture.

- Squash the balls slightly, place well apart (although I only used one tray here and they didn't merge) and bake for 10-15 minutes. I found mine took 16 minutes.

I can see these becoming a favourite around here - they were really quick to put together and to bake and are deliciously soft and chewy. The ginger and chocolate work really well together and the honey is delicious too although the fairly mild honey I used doesn't come through strongly. As they don't have an egg in them it's really easy to halve the recipe too - always a bonus.

I am entering these into this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, hosted by Jen of Blue Kitchen Bakes and co-hosted by Choclette of Choc Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot. The theme this month is ginger and I absolutely adore chocolate, ginger and the combination of the two!

I'm also entering them into Jac's bookmarked recipes challenge as I had noted the recipe on Choclette's blog ages ago and have finally got round to making them.