Leftovers Chocolate Chip Cookies

Today we return to Pascha Chocolate, one of the best allergen free chocolate brands out there today with a test involving their 55% baking chips. Starting next week is "World Allergy Week" so to honor those with allergies, including your chocolate priestess and everyone in her household, we're doing create a recipe with this last bag of baking chips that we received to test from Pascha Chocolate - 55% Organic Semi-Sweet Dark Chocolate Chips. In forthcoming months we will continue to test chocolate from Pascha Chocolate but in the bars that they sent us. I'm calling this "leftovers" to reflect the fact that I'm using more ingredients I was sent by other companies as well in this recipe. Now that I've figured out how to use these products and I have so much leftover, I thought this was a good way to use them up (or at least more of them) and try out these chips.

I won't claim that the following treat is completely allergy free -- just within my own family I can see how wide spread food allergies are so someone somewhere will be allergic to one of these ingredients, perhaps even chocolate itself. These chocolate chips are made from organic sugar, organic cocoa mass, organic cocoa butter, and organic vanilla -- nothing else!

Leftovers Chocolate Chip Cookies
by: TammyJo Eckhart, PhD

Ingredients:
1 bag of 55% Organic Semi-Sweet Dark Chocolate Chips from Pascha Chocolate

1 stick light butter, salted, brought to room temperature

1/2 cup all natural, no sugar added, applesauce

6 T liquid egg substitute

1 T vanilla extract

1/2 cup boiling water with 1 T baking soda dissolved in it

70 g raw cacao powder

1/2 cup Xylitol sweetener

1/2 cup Splenda brown sugar blend, firmly packed

208 g rice flour

1 T baking powder


Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 325°F because of the lower heating times for the sugars and the flour.

2. Measure out all of your ingredients and set up an electric mixer; I use a standing one myself.

3. Mix together all of the wet ingredients until well blended. I recommend cutting up the butter into 1/2 T pieces.

4. Add in the raw cacao powder and mix on medium speed stopping to scrape the bowl at least twice. It takes a while the cocoa powder to be fully blended into the wet ingredients.

5. Add in the rice flour and treat it as you did step 4. This will blend faster but be sure to scrape the bowl or mix thoroughly.

6. Add in the chips and mix them in until they are spread fairly evenly around the dough.

7. Place spoonfuls of the dough on greased cookie sheet about two inches apart.

8. Bake for 11 minutes depending on your oven.

9. Take out of oven and remove from cookie sheet to cool on a paper covered table or countertop for at least 5 minutes

10. Eat! The inside should be fluffy and the chips should be melty even after they cool down.

There you go, our final recipe with Pascha 55% Chocolate Chips. What did you think? My testers -- all six of us -- loved these chips. They kept their shape and yet even eight hours after baking had a melty quality to them as soon as you bit into one or let one set in your mouth. They were a perfect balance of dark and sweet, too. One tester loved them so much that she picked them out of the cookies to eat solo! These definitely earn our Sacrament status!