Chocolate Decorated Cookies for your Valentine

I always need a little bit of chocolate after lunch and dinner......and yes, sometimes even after breakfast.  Hey--don't judge; mornings can be rough.

When it comes to satisfying my post-meal sweet tooth, only dark bittersweet chocolate accomplishes the task, although I enjoy semi-sweet chocolate, white chocolate and milk chocolate on occasion (and by "on occasion", I mean any time I am out of dark chocolate.)

The more bittersweet my chocolate treat is, the better.  I'll take 90% cocoa over 70% cocoa any day of the week.  I'm adventurous like that.

Like red wine, bittersweet or dark chocolate is an acquired taste.  I remember hating Hershey's Special Dark chocolate bars when I was a kid, and they were always the last pieces left in my Halloween stash at the bottom of the bowl (which my mom tried to hide, but I always found.)  I couldn't even give them away to my brother.

I also used to hate the taste of red wine.

Oh, how things have changed.

I found that, once I started to sample and bake with different types of bittersweet chocolate, I gradually lost my taste for varietals that contain more sugar.....no offense to the almighty M&M.  I think this is because the chocolate flavor is so concentrated in bittersweet bars that it seems like you get more bang for your bite.  Even a small piece will fill my required post-dinner chocolate quotient (commonly known as the PDCQ.)

That said, I'll often have two pieces, just because.

Most of my baking is done with dark chocolate or, in the case of these cookies, unsweetened cocoa powder which often mimics the taste of dark chocolate when enough is used in a recipe.  You can buy dark unsweetened cocoa powder, also known as black cocoa, but it is harder to find than regular unsweetened cocoa.  For this recipe, either varietal will work.

Cocoa powder is much lower in fat than dark chocolate, but doctors have said that dark chocolate is an antioxidant that can help to lower blood pressure.   So I say, bake with both!

Use this cookie dough recipe with my classic royal icing recipe found here.  For a dark chocolate cookie, I recommend flavoring the icing with and almond, peppermint or coconut extract instead of lemon juice.  Or you can just leave it vanilla-flavored,  because these cookies are anything but "plain vanilla!"

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