Like, totally rad

I've been working my way through the Model Bakery cookbook, in no particular order.  So far, I have completely failed to find a recipe therein which does not meet with high praise, muffled by being spoken with a full mouth.  The book is outstanding, and not just for the full-page shots of food porn.  The recipes themselves are great, although they sometimes call for weird ingredients, or have directives I don't understand (I always work by hand, but the primary directions are for food processors. The oven temperatures are conveniently listed with three settings: Fahrenheit, Celsius, and "gas," which is always a single digit number.  I have a gas oven, but this digit means nothing to me.)

One of the recipes I've wanted to try since buying the book finally got its day this winter.  The picture of the Chocolate Rads shows an enormous, highly textured macro shot of a single cookie, whose diameter nearly spans the page.  I came to discover that this is a life-size shot.  Be warned: these cookies are not only very large, they are very rich.  They're not cookies so much as blocks of chocolate and sugar supporting a thin matrix of flour.  That's the good news.  The bad news is, I think they dry out too quickly.  My recommendation is to either bake them in batches as needed, or bake them for a large gathering.  The book says you'll get "12 large cookies."  I think my count was closer to sixteen, and they were still plenty big.

Chocolate Rads

2/3 C flour
2.5 t baking powder
1/4 t salt (the book says "fine sea salt," but I'm not that picky)
1 lb semisweet chocolate (55% cacao or less), chopped.  I used a bag and a half of chips.
4 T unsalted butter, room temp.
1 2/3 C sugar
4 large eggs (the Model Bakery is really big on using eggs at room temperature.  I usually forget that part.  Do as you will)
1 T cold brewed espresso, or 1 t instant espresso dissolved in 1 T boiling water, cooled
2.5 t vanilla
2 C chocolate chips
1 C chopped walnuts (I was out of walnuts, but we had some "white baking chips" left over from another recipe that I wanted to get out of the kitchen)

1. First thing is melting the chocolate.  There are many schools of thought here, but I think the prevailing method is some sort of double-boiler arrangement.  I don't have a double boiler, I finally succeeded in convincing the Chief Taster to get rid of hers to gain some room in the cupboards, and I've read that double boilers really aren't that good at double boiling, anyway.  If you have a metal mixing bowl that will rest over a saucepan of simmering water, use that.  If you don't (my mixing bowls are all glass), then wrangle something else.  I found that I can rest my smallest saucepan inside the next largest, and the protruding lip keeps it from resting a bottom edge in the larger pot, which would make a hot spot.  But I digress.  Melt the damn chocolate.  Stir occasionally, just until smooth, then remove from heat and stir in the butter.
2. Beat the sugar and eggs together.  Add the espresso and vanilla.  It should be pale yellow and a little fluffed before the bean-based ingredients, and darker after.  Stir in the melted chocolate, then the flour, baking powder, and salt.  When the batter is homogeneous (and honestly, kind of gross-looking), add chips and nuts.  Or chips and chips, if you're cleaning out the fridge like I was.  This dough is really soft, so let it stand 20 or 30 minutes so it can firm up a little.  By the way, I hope you  (I told you n're not excited to eat these bad boys right away, because...
3. Lay a big piece of parchment paper (about 1x1.5 feet) on your counter.  Spoon big globs of dough onto it in a line parallel to the long side.  Get it all on there.  Spatula your bowl clean, if you have to.  Wet your hands, then form the dough globs into a big smooth log, about a foot long and 3 inches in diameter.  Smooth the ends so it's a nice, neat cylinder.  I'm laughing as I watch you do this, because it will be a big, sticky mess, and you're going to do your best, but you'll have doubts about the entire enterprise by now.  Stick with it.  It's worth it.  Wrap the paper around your goo-log and twist the ends shut.  Put the log on a baking sheet and stick it in the fridge 2 to 24 hours. (I told you not to get anxious)
4. Heat the oven to 350F (gas 4, if you're curious).  Line your baking sheets with parchment paper.
5. Pull the log out of the fridge.  It will be a little flat on the bottom side, so roll it a little to smooth it and re-round it.  It won't make a difference in a moment, because the shape will get mangled when you slice the log, but just fight the good fight as long as you can, ok?  Unwrap the dough and wet a thin, sharp knife.  Cut 1" slices and arrange them on your baking sheets.  This is important, so listen up: the book says four cookies per baking sheet.  They are not fucking around.  I think I managed to get 6 on my sheets, but a couple of them became a mega-cookie, and these are already really big cookies.  You get four, maybe six to a sheet.  That's it.  Whatever doesn't fit on the baking sheet goes back in the fridge.  The sheets bake about 20 minutes.  The tops of the cookies will crack and the edges will crisp.  Swap the sheets top-for-bottom and rotate them 180 about halfway through to get more even cooking.  When you pull them out, let them set on the pans about five minutes before moving them to whatever cooling surface you prefer.  Repeat with remaining dough.
6. NOW you can eat.  Pace yourself.  It's really easy to make yourself sick by eating only five or six of these.

That's my hand for scale.  You probably haven't met my hand, so I'll tell you that the palm part is about 3" by 3".  The cookies were bigger.