I have a complicated relationship with chocolate. I spent the first 20 or so years of my life not liking it at all. Marbled birthday cake? I’ll just eat the white parts, thank you very much. Oreo cookies? Yup, I was the type to lick out the centers and try to pass off the slobbery wafers on unsuspecting siblings. Chocolate ice cream? Honestly, I’m still not into it.
But at some point, a little chocolate seed in my food brain started to sprout and now I find myself craving it from time to time. You don’t see a lot of chocolaty recipes around here, because my cravings tend to require immediate action–no time for recipes or pictures. When I need chocolate, there’s usually not time to wait around for butter to soften or ovens to preheat, it’s more of a how-can-I-get-half-a-bag-of-chocolate-chips-into-my-mouth-as-quickly-as-possible sort of situation.
Well, I found myself in a days-long chocolate mood last week. My pantry was in rough shape–not a chocolate chip or baking bar in sight. I cleaned out my freezer, hoping to find a forgotten brownie or slice of cake. No luck. I tried concocting a frothy/sludgy iced mocha with cocoa powder; didn’t work. I needed intense chocolate, something I could hold onto, chewy, fudgy, and decadent. I needed to do it right. I needed a big batch of cookies.
These cookies are everything I could’ve asked for and most definitely worth a trip to the grocery store/waiting for the oven to preheat. They are intensely chocolaty, fudgy in the center, chewy around the edges. I snuck in a handful of rum-soaked cherries but I imagine chopped walnuts or candied ginger being equally delicious.
Just writing the title of this post, I feel like a maniac. How on earth do you even punctuate such a cookie concoction?
One thing I really appreciated about traveling in Belgium and the Netherlands this fall was that every time I ordered a coffee or tea, it would be served with a little something sweet. In most cases, it’s just a packaged cookie or a thin wafer of chocolate, but once in a while, you really luck out and get a tiny cream puff or a narrow sliver of a tart. 
The way I see it, there are 2 ways to deal with