This post is going to be about one of my favourite topics; chocolate! I love to bake with it, cook with it, drink it, nibble on it, smell it… you get the idea, right? My husband even found a ‘chocolate spa’ treatment for my birthday, many years ago. And yes, I absolutely adored that experience!
Tonight, as I write this, the delicious odour of chocolate is wafting through my home. I’ve just baked a new recipe, one I’d wanted to test out for the holidays. Two dozen triple-dark chocolate cookies came out of the oven not long ago ‘-)
We split one of them, as the batch was cooling off, and it was decadently scrumptious. We’ll have to wait until they’ve cooled off completely (tomorrow), but so far it’s looking as though my husband may have a new favourite cookie. Until now, my oatmeal dark-chocolate chunk cookies have been his top pick.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for new holiday dessert recipes for months, after learning an important lesson before the holidays last year. Rather than trying to push through the fatigue, pain, and other symptoms of my rare disease, to finish something all at once, I need to break activities up into smaller tasks.
This includes my holiday baking! For example I’ve finally learned that I can’t bake a layer cake all in one go any more, without triggering an excruciating pain flare that might last for hours or even days. It’s too much to bake the cake, make the icing, prepare the cake for frosting, and then decorate it all in within a few hours.
I still love to bake, but have taken to adding quite a lot of extra time into the preparation phase of each recipe. I might mix together all of the dry ingredients, and then take a break and do something else for a while. Instead of making the icing while the cake is still in the oven, now I’ll wait for my creation to cool completely. Sometimes I won’t even make the icing until the next day.
It’s a case of trying to listen to my body, to my disease, to judge what I can do at a given time. The same holds true for cooking. If I’m planning to make a soup or a stew for dinner, I’ll break up the steps as much as I can throughout the day.
I might hack at the vegetables in the early morning, trying to chop them with my left (‘bad’) hand and the thumb of my right hand, while the coffee is brewing. Then, obviously, I take a coffee break ‘-)
Another great trick I’ve learned is to buy as many of the vegetables as possible in a fresh pre-chopped or pre-shredded format. My grocery store now has several options for packaged pre-prepared fresh veggies.
Also very helpful are packages of frozen chopped vegetables. Did you know that frozen spiralized butternut squash makes a fantastic last-minute addition to soups, as it cooks very quickly?
Wait a second, I was writing about chocolate and now I’m talking about soups… it’s time to get back on track here! The recipe that I’ve just made said that it would take only 30 minutes, from start to baked chocolate cookies. That wasn’t exactly the case, for me.
It took a few minutes for me to assemble all the ingredients, and to break up the different kinds of chocolate. Then I needed to take a little break, to rest the hand that is affected by Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS); even though I hadn’t really used that hand.
Once I was ready to get back to the cookie recipe, things did progress fairly quickly. I cheated, though, by melting two of the different types of chocolate in the microwave instead of over a pot of boiling water.
Although I have a double-boiler in which to do this easily, I can’t use my right hand to stir the chocolate continuously until it melts. Stirring with my left hand isn’t a good alternative, as I would have splattered melted chocolate across the kitchen! Yes, I’ve done that before ‘-(
One of the things that had attracted me to this new recipe was that it uses a stand-mixer for the batter. Most of my old recipes for cookies require that the batter be carefully hand-mixed, and that’s too hard for me to do now. My sweetheart bought me a beautiful green stand-mixer a couple of years ago, and I’m definitely putting it to good use.
Another advantage is that this batter makes only 2 dozen cookies, with a dozen on each pan. I have two cookie pans, so could prepare one then take a break before preparing the second dozen. Tonight I didn’t need to do that, which was nice; I was able to get both cookie sheets into the oven at once, saving some baking time. And some electricity as well.
Finally, this is a very short recipe with clearly separated steps. One of the most disturbing symptoms of my CRPS has been the mild cognitive impairment that I’ve been experiencing since late last year – the reason for which I’ve had to step away from my career and my dream job.
I’ve found, by botching several attempts at baking desserts that I’d easily made in the past, that I can no longer follow lengthy or convoluted recipes. If the written instructions for something – whether for a game, a recipe, a tool, or something else – aren’t well delineated, I now have difficulty in following them.
In recipes, I might skip a step; forget to add an ingredient, or add it at the wrong step in the process. I’ve always loved to bake, so have almost 50 years of experience with home baking… I’d grown to love more complex recipes, but now have to abandon them.
A scant 8 minutes after the rounded bits of batter went into the oven, these little dark-chocolate cookies were ready 😉 Rather than the stated 30 minutes, it probably took me an hour to make them – including the time it took for me to pull all of the ingredients out of the pantry, break the baking chocolate, melt the chocolate, etc. That’s still a reasonable time outlay, for 24 good-sized and very rich cookies.
Some of my beloved old cookie recipes make 50 or 60 small cookies, and required a lot more work from my hands; scooping or spooning out such small portions of batter, over and over again. That would take me hours to do now, using only my left (‘wrong’) hand.
It would also be so frustrating for me, knowing that prior to CRPS I’d have been able to do that so quickly – and enjoyed it.
This new cookie recipe will probably make an appearance for the holidays, and will definitely be re-used for special events in the future! It’s not always easy to do, but this is one occasion for which having to find different ways to do things – in order to accommodate the limitations of my disease – turned out much better than I’d hoped.
In looking for new recipes that could accommodate my new limitations, I’ve found quite a few that we love. So that’s the bright side, and you know that I always like to look on the bright side of things. That, and anything involving chocolate!
As always, thanks so much for reading! I wish you the happiest of holidays – whichever you celebrate! No matter whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, the Pagan winter festivals of Saturnalia and Yule, another holiday, none at all, or simply the start of the New Year and a new decade, may it be joyous and filled with laughter and love!