Salted pistachio chocolate cookies

Salted pistachio and chocolate cookies

I guess I’ve got bloggers’s block and it’s getting to be a real pain. When I’m not out and about with friends or pottering away in my kitchen I want to be spending my time on the right side of my brain; taking photos, trying new flavour combinations, starting to write... For those that follow thetwicebitten regularly you might have noticed that the number of posts have dropped from an enthusiastic 7 per month when I first started to a dismal 1 per month of late. At first I brushed it off as “just a bit busy at the moment” and tried to avoid acknowledging my difficulty. Quiet Sunday afternoons that I had pencilled in to write came and went with no fruits of my labour at the end of them. It just felt so forced and contrived. Anne Lammont in “Bird by Bird” beautifully captures hating what you write and it’s a book I’ve been coming back to time and time again. I’m going to plod on thanks to all the support from my lovely friends and I'm going to try to remember that the real prize is in the progress. In the meantime I’m going to  keep filling my tummy with yummy things and fill my mind with the food writing greats. Here goes nothing.

Salted pistachio and chocolate cookies

Salted pistachio chocolate cookies – adapted from the hummingbird bakery cookbook

Makes12 cookies

You will need 2 baking trays lined with greaseproof paper

Preheat oven to 170 degrees

50g unsalted butter

300g dark chocolate, roughly chopped

2 eggs

170g light muscovado sugar

¼ tsp vanilla extract

85g plain flour

½ tsp sea salt

½ tsp baking powder

70g shelled pistachios - chopped

few pinches of sea salt

Melt the butter and 225g of the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.

Remove from the heat once smooth.

Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract with an electric whisk until well mixed.

Pour in the chocolate mixture to the egg mixture and stir in with a wooden spoon.

Sift in the flour, ½ tsp of salt and the baking powder in 3 additions into the chocolate eggy mixture and stir until mixed.

Stir in the remaining 75g of chocolate.

Arrange the mixture with 6 equal sized dollops of cookie mixture per baking tray.

Be sure to leave enough space between them as they will spread during cooking.

Sprinkle the pistachios and the sea salt to taste onto the top of the cookies.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, checking after 10 minutes.

They are ready when glossy and cracked on top, they will still be soft and gooey.

Leave to cook a little before turning out to cool completely on a wire rack.

Enjoy

Salted pistachio and chocolate cookies