Upping the Calorie Count

I've just eaten my last batch of pre-Lenten cookies: every time I eat something involving chocolate at the moment it's as if I'm self-administering the last rites by instalments. Has to be said that it neither makes it taste any better, nor makes me feel any better about it - and it doesn't seem to make me less inclined to eat it either.

Cookies have been one of my great comforts of the past year or so. It's partly Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's fault, as it's one of his recipes that I have been using. I have to say that he's not generally my kind of cook - if you find yourself being subjected to the consequences of weird butchery in the wilds of Chiswick, he's almost always to blame - but his cookie recipe is spot on. It makes the kind of cookies which are chewy without being more than a little bit crisp or ever so slightly spongey. I've tried it enough times to know that it works better with 'proper' dark chocolate than it does with anything more anaemic. I've even tried it enough times to know that I prefer it with Green & Black 70% to most other brands (although the Tesco finest 72ish% works OK if I'm feeling poor), and that it chops into about the right size chunks if you chop the little squares into 4, and that it chops most easily in winter weather if it has been in the cupboard near (but not next to) the hot water pipe for a day or two. If I'm using a medium rather than a large egg, I reduce the rest of the ingredients by about 10%. And it doesn't seem to matter much what kind of sugar you use.

I didn't grow up with cookies, although there was plenty of home baking around. Cookies have the attraction of being exotic. I remember very clearly the first time I ate proper home-made chocolate chip cookies: the fact that they remind me of a particular boy at a particular time certainly does nothing to put me off them.

But they also have the advantage of making up into relatively small batches. I have the same problem with cakes and biscuits as I have with chocolate: if they are there, I eat them. The cookie recipe makes about a dozen. Eating a dozen cookies is bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as eating an entire tray of brownies or a whole, large carrot cake. I just concentrate on not thinking about the fact that making a bar of chocolate into cookies miraculously converts about 550 calories into something more like 4,000.

If I actually manage to do this (the giving up), I intend to spend Easter Sunday morning making cookies.