Chocolate crackle tops

Ingredients

·         200 g dark cooking chocolate

·         90 g of butter

·         115 g of caster sugar

·         5 ml of vanilla essence

·         200 g of plain flour

·         ½ tsp of baking powder

·         Pinch of salt (omit if using salted butter)

·         25 g cocoa powder

·         100 – 150 g of icing sugar for coating (see recipe)

·          Method

1.       Melt chocolate and butter until smooth

2.       Add eggs one at the time, mixing in between each egg

3.       Add sugar

4.       Stir in vanilla essence

5.       Add in at once the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder.

6.       Your dough would be quite soft. Place a plastic film on top and place in the fridge for at least an hour (or a day!).  If you have used couverture chocolate, you dough would be fine to use straight away (couverture chocolate crystallise quite quick when cooling down).

7.        Once the dough is hard enough, remove from the fridge.  Heat up the oven to 180 deg C. Use an ice-cream spoon or any strong spoon to form walnut size pieces. Roll in a ball. Place a couple tablespoons of icing sugar in a larger bowl and dust the balls all over.  Remove any excess by shaking it off.

8.      Place on a baking sheet covered with a baking paper or buttered. Insert in the oven for no more than 10 minutes (between 7 and 10 minutes). The top should be lightly firm. Transfer to a cooling rack.  You will need two rounds or two baking sheet to bake all the biscuits. Keep well for a week in a box.

http://breadnbutterkids.com/recipes-2/chocolate-crackle-tops/