Chocolate Stripes

One of my all-time favorites, these chocolate and rum-striped cookies taste best when frozen and go excellently with hot chocolate.

Happy Valentine's Day for those of you who have a liking for this day...the rest of you are hereby invited to watch tacky 80's movies at my place tonight and I promise there will be no flowers or chocolate in sight.

Haha, I sound like a pessimist, but really I just can't care about this holiday this year. Last year, my then-boyfriend bought me socks...that he put into the box that I had given him his present in. Let's note, I gave him candy he likes, red and white fortune cookies (so cute! check them out!), little notes about all the things I liked about him, and a schedule card for the professional massage I bought him. Not to mention that I had taken him out to a nice dinner, bought him a watch, and made him a triple layer cake for his birthday a few days prior. And I! Got! Socks?!?!?! [In hindsight, it's not a HUGE surprise that this relationship didn't make it. --B.]

Needless to say, if not having a Valentine means one less pair of socks in my life, I'm perfectly content to be without. (To be fair to the former boyfriend, he bought me a massage as a surprise a few weeks later when he realized just how greatly I had trumped him. A big thanks to his father for kicking his butt on that one.)

Moving on.

Point is, if there's any love that needed to be celebrated for Valentine's Day, it's the love between Butch and I. [Even that one is bumpy and ill-fated, as you're about to find out. --B.] We wanted to make these simple, striped cookies that I've loved for a long time. But there were a few too many cooks in the kitchen. My roommate had some friends over, and with five people in our small little kitchen, I might have cut some corners. Literally. I skipped the plastic wrap step. Don't do that. Never do that. To get the striped dough out of the glass pan without plastic wrap, I had to tap it pretty hard against the counter. Too hard. It shattered so completely it cut my hand in three places and left tons of glass IN the cookie dough and all around the floor. [Where are those Valentine's socks when you need them? --B.]

The good news is that if you just cut off the outside of the dough square, the inside doesn't have any glass shards. The bad news is that your cookies are still Hazmat when you've also bled all over the counter. So, around my kitchen, these striped darlings will now be known as "glass shard cookies of rage and despair." Unless you actually wanted to eat any of them, it was pretty darn funny.

[Let me interject here, so this post doesn't sound too much like J. is on her way to a "long rest in the country." A Valentine's post is the thing to do at this time of year, and J. loves these cookies, so we wanted to do them. But V-day, man. Either you're hooked up, and you somehow have to equal your partner in expressions of affection and inevitably fail (see the socks affair above) or you're not, and all the perfectly kind people that you normally like start to look like smug @#$%* when they get flowers at work and you don't. What a mess.

Regardless, we weren't just being festive when we said that J. and I wanted to celebrate our wonderful, fabulous friendship. That's real. We've been through some @#$%* together, and I can say that there's a very short list of people who'd make a rope braid of their own hair to get me out of a pit, and J. is undoubtedly on it. So, happy V-day, girl. I toast you with a bloody glass cookie. May we never again skip the plastic wrap.

And to you readers, may you all be better off than we are, with unsullied desserts and boyfriends/girlfriends with the appropriate taste in gifts. Unless, of course, socks are just what you've always wanted. In which case, I hear J.'s ex is still single... --B.]

Cheers!

Chocolate Stripes

adapted from Chocolate Ribbon Cookies

1/2 cup unsalted butter

1/2 cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups flour

1/3 cup semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled

1/4 teaspoon rum flavoring

pink food coloring

In a mixing bowl beat butter and shortening with an electric mixer on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar, baking soda, and salt; beat until combined. Beat in the egg, milk, and vanilla. Beat in as much of the flour as you can with the mixer. Stir in remaining flour.

Divide dough in half. Knead the melted chocolate into half of the dough. Knead the pink food coloring and rum flavoring into the other half of dough. Divide each portion of dough in half.

To shape dough, line the bottom and sides of a 9x5x3-inch loaf pan with clear plastic wrap (DO NOT skip this). Press half of the chocolate dough evenly in pan. Top with half of the vanilla dough, the remaining chocolate dough, and the remaining vanilla dough, pressing each layer firmly and evenly over the preceding layer.

Invert pan to remove dough. Peel off plastic wrap. Slice the block of dough into 1/4-inch-thick slices. If desired use cookie cutter to cut out fun shapes, otherwise, cut the slices into thirds. Place cookies 2 inches apart on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet.

Bake cookies in a 375 degree F. oven about 10 minutes or until edges are firm and bottoms are lightly browned. Transfer cookies to wire racks; cool.