#11 Chocolate Wafers 1950

Flat and round on the page, with a slightly ruddy texture. Not so much eye-appeal against the insistently modern black background of their photo (one-fourth of the way down the page). These cookies might have been hockey pucks or cow pies. Maybe hard, maybe soft, but they were the first chocolate cookie in the book, maybe a sign of good things to come.

Right away I thought of the "Famous Wafers" I buy every holiday season only to pulverize them for my rum balls recipe. I hoped my home made cookies would prove more worthy of eating in cookie form than the store-bought. Turns out the two cookies have only two features in common; they are both thin and richly chocolaty in flavor. Beyond that, my work was worth the trouble.

This dough sets up firm and smooth after three hours in the frig, and I found them more friendly to roll out than cookies of the 1940's. Way to start the day right. The scent of dark chocolate permeates the kitchen as they roll, and completely overtakes the senses during baking. While still hot, a spatula slips them easily from the cookie sheet, with no added butter on the sheet, And they hold their shape.

I think half the appeal of rolled out cookies is their shape. My knitting group cooed at them, "They're so pretty!" when I showed up with a plate of Aztec sun shapes.

The bitey, dark chocolate flavor didn't hurt either. The home made versions bloom in the mouth with a blend of the best natural ingredients (butter, real vanilla, Equal Exchange organic cocoa), about half as many ingredients as the store cookie, and none of the butter substitutes (soybean oil, coconut oil, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil) or sugar substitutes (high fructose corn syrup). Bleck.

Jean appreciated the air pockets in this thin cookie.

"There's a lot of bang for the size of this cookie. Flavor, I mean," Jeanne said. "And look how thin it is."

Everyone agreed they could have a second cookie without guilt, so I went home with only two - my afternoon snack.

Dough dusted with part flour-part cocoa mixture.

I made one recipe substitution. For the 1 T. rum extract, I used 1 tsp. vanilla and 1 T. 151 rum. Even when vanilla is not the main flavor, it has a mellowing effect. Not sure if that citrusy note I detect is from chocolate or a rum undertone. No matter, these are winners. Bring on the rest of the 1950's.

TECHNIQUE: I was concerned if I rolled out these cookies with white flour on the counter that I'd have bits of white left on the  baked cookies. I had good reason to wonder. White flour clung to the bottoms of the Cinnamon Sugar Crisps, and only disappeared from the tops because I brushed them with water to add the sugar sprinkles. So, I mixed a small amount of flour and cocoa together to coat the disk of dough before rolling out.  Problem solved. Besides, they didn't need much coating to roll out stick-free. My cold marble slab from the garage kept the dough chilled and firm.

The recipe is here and here (three-fourths of the way down the page).