Sick Whinning + Chocolate Chewies

Internet, I am sick. This is weird for me because since I started working in hospitals a few years ago, I never get sick. Well, first I was sick ALL THE TIME for the first year and then I developed crazy antibodies and my white blood cells are now made of steel. Until now.

Friday night I was unable to sleep because I was so nauseous, but I figured it was just my stomach hating me as per usual, I'm nauseous all the time. But then I started throwing up and getting chills and I knew I was in trouble. My fever finally broke today, which means I can do more than a) sleep or b) stare blankly at the TV for ten hours. But my stomach is still rioting and won't let me consume more than a bottle of vitamin water a day. Thanks, mysterious stomach virus.

So no baking until I can look at a glass of water without gagging. Lucky for you, here are some cookies I made earlier this month. On the Super Bowl, actually.



I've never been a big sports person. Nobody in my family played or watched sports and I don't have a competitive bone in my body. I tried a bunch of sports in middle school, but was tragically bad at all of them. Being five feet tall didn't help. I did become track manager in 8th grade when I promised to make the coaches batches of cookies. And so began my obsession with baking.

Anyways, so I'm not sure I've watched a Super Bowl in my life, except for bits and pieces when I was waiting to watch commercials. I watched more this year than I ever have in my life, and that was only after watching the Puppy Bowl.

The Puppy Bowl is put on by Animal Planet is exactly what it sounds like: for two hours, they put various puppies in a room decorated to look like a football stadium and then film the adorable puppies playing. There is also a delightful kitty half time show, in which a dozen kittens play with various spinning, shinning, and moving objects. It kind of looks like an acid flashback, actually.

Joe, BJ and I had a Puppy Bowl party and recorded the Super Bowl to browse through later. Joe made a caloric-ly dense onion dip and I made chocolate cookies. There's these low-fat chocolate cookies at Whole Foods which I really like, not because they're low fat but because they have a crunchy meringue-like shell with chewy cake like interior. I hadn't been able to replicate them very well but recently stumbled on this site which looked pretty close to the Whole Foods version.


And they were! I really liked this guys. The only thing that I would like to change is how thick these were and looking at her page, it looks like that could be changed by using a muffin top or english muffin pan.

Here's her recipe at Cafe Luna,you'll have to read it ALL BY YOURSELF.

I'll admit I used Hershey's cocoa, it's all I had and the choices at my local grocery store were either Hershey's cocoa or "Food Club" brand cocoa, which is probably saw dust and food coloring. I added a few melted squares of a good quality 100% chocolate bar, which improved the flavor but my cookies still looked a bit anemic compared to hers. I also left out the walnuts since we didn't have them and I don't like them much.

Overall, I really like this recipe and will probably experiment with it again in the future with better ingredients when my body stops hating me.