Hungry Hippo

At times, anal retentive/OCD behaviour can be rather useful. It was the day I made these cookies, because they turned out well, and now I can attempt to recreate their lemon-chocolateyness another day. As well, others can too. I got the original cookie recipe from Baking Sheet, an excellent blog about, well, you guessed it, baking (and cooking too). I started changing some of the proportions of the ingredients; for example, being the slave to chocolate and fat that I am, I increased the amount of chocolate chips, and went for full size chips instead of the mini variety, and started skimming the top off of unhomogenized whole milk yoghurt. But this recipe has quickly become one of my favourites, because the light citrusey tang of Meyer lemons nicely off-sets the chocolate chip overload, which occurs with a slip of the wrist while measuring out that last step over the bowl of cookie dough (this is precisely why home-ec classes across the globe give the age old advice of measuring ingredients anywhere but over the bowl/pot/skillet in which you are preparing the food). I really do think that the brand of some of the ingredients have made a difference in the cookies, so the nit-picky specifics of the recipe are as follows:

Cocoa Fudge Chocolate Chip Meyer Lemon Cookies (whew, that's a mouthful)

1 C all purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 C butter, room temp. (Organic Valley)
7 tbsp cocoa powder (Green and Black’s Organic/Fair Trade cocoa powder)
1 C evaporated cane juice sugar
1/3 C plain yoghurt (skimmed off the top of Hawthorne Valley’s unhomogenized whole milk yoghurt for some cream action)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 C (heaping) Ghiradelli semi-sweet chocolate chips (plus a handful more, if you are so inclined)

For optional lemon flavour:
grated zest from 2 Meyer lemons (approx. 2 tbsp)
4 tbsp freshly squeezed Meyer lemon juice
1/2 tbsp grated zest from a regular lemon

Preheat oven to 350F.
Mix together flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl.
In a larger, microwave-safe bowl, melt butter in the microwave. Sift in cocoa powder. Mix in sugar. Stir in yoghurt and vanilla extract. Stir in lemon juice and zest. Add flour mixture and mix until just combined. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop tablespoonfuls of the cookie dough onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
Bake at 350F for 10-13 minutes and/or until slightly firm at edges. Allow to cool on pan for 3 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to completely cool. Cookies should be crisp around the edges, but otherwise chewy throughout.
Makes ~2 dozen.