Chilli-Chocolate Cookie Recipe

Chocolate is a great ingredient which is used frequently in cooking. It’s mainly used in popular desserts like chocolate cake, chocolate mousse and chocolate cheesecake, but did you know that it is often used in savory dishes too?

Chilli and chocolate compliment each other beautifully. For some reason, if you add a couple of chunks of dark chocolate into a spaghetti sauce or a chilli con carne, it really brings out the flavor of the spicy chilli. It also works in reverse; adding a dash of chilli powder to a chocolate dessert, helps to bring out the rich chocolate flavor even more in your dish. The science is bizarre but it’s a great little cooking tip. If you are a keen cook and you attend evening classes to improve your baking skills, you might like to invite your class friends over to try out the chilli-chocolate cookie recipe below, then taste and compare your cookies with each other over a game of Cheekybingo , before discussing how you could change or adapt the recipe. You will be surprised how spicy the cookies will be, which is why it is best to serve them with ice-cream.

Ingredients

• 2 sticks of butter
• Half a cup of white sugar
• Half a cup of dark sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups of plain flour
• 2 heaped tbsps of cocoa powder
• A pinch of baking powder
• 1½ teaspoons of cayenne pepper
• 2 bars of dark chilli chocolate
• A teaspoon of chilli powder

Method
1. In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, pepper and chilli powder together.
2. Let the butter soften before beating it with both sugars. Once the mixture is smooth, gradually mix the vanilla extract and eggs into the cookie mixture.
3. Melt the chocolate and fold it into the cookie mixture, along with the remaining dry ingredients.
4. Turn the oven to gas mark 4 and while it heats up, place small spoonfuls of the cookie mixture onto baking sheets.
5. Bake for around 10-12 minutes (depending on how gooey you like your cookies). Leave to cool and serve with vanilla ice-cream.