There are recipes I spend considerable amount of time on, first researching then testing, take one and take two, bin, tweak, finally – all right. Meh. Try again, replace butter with oil, eggs with bacon, sugar with salt and it still produces a half-a**ed result. And then sometimes there is something I’ve seen on the Internet or in a magazine at the hairdresser’s, fleetingly, try it once and it turns out to be a real corker.
So it was with these cookies – honest, guv, no idea where I saw a similar recipe but I remembered the buckwheat flour, brown sugar and dark chocolate. I wasn’t sure how long to bake them for: with cookies less is always more but these were positively runny after 10 minutes so I took them to the cracked stage. If you want them to be lava-like inside, truly black-hearted, take them out sooner. Baked longer, they will resemble good brownies, which of course isn’t a bad thing either.
There is an industrial quantity of chocolate in these cookies – and you can tell after just one bite. Everything about them is dark: dark chocolate, cocoa, dark brown sugar, buckwheat flour and only the chocolate chips I threw in are a bit lighter, against the all-consuming darkness.