Double Chocolate Oriolos

These are simple chocolate wafers which somehow become richer and more interesting the more you eat.  These cookies are really Woody's babies.  When he was at my house, he had an event to go to, and had promised to bring dozens of cookies, so he made a huge batch of these, and I helped.

JJ helped too.  This is the day he discovered that he liked walnuts, as long as they were scraped clean of their bitter-tasting skin.

Woody scrubs the walnuts much cleaner than I do when I'm in my kitchen alone with no one observing.  When Woody is in my kitchen, he says, "Those walnuts have a lot of skin left on them."  I say, "I scrubbed them in a towel."  He says, "But you didn't pick off the rest of the skin."  "Pick it off?!" I exclaim.  "That's crazy."  But I do it anyway.

Then I watch Woody prepare the dough in the food processor.  I must say, it looks very easy when someone else is doing it.  I could really get into this notion of watching someone else bake.  Woody likes to put plastic wrap over the food processor so the top doesn't get dirty.  I can see that this might be considered a good idea, but I doubt if I'll do it.  I don't think Woody feels as guilty as I do about using multitudes of plastic wrap.

"Add the flour and pulse it in until there are a lot of little moist, crumbly pieces and no dry flour particles remain."

Now it's going on a big piece of plastic wrap.  Woody doesn't think my plastic wrap is wide enough, but he's very cheerful when he complains so I don't get cross.

Woody says to be sure to tell the other Alphas that he's doing the kneading so they won't wonder why my hands have gotten hairy.

I volunteer to do the weighing and rolling into balls.  Each cookie must be 12 grams.  Woody looks truly alarmed when I tell him that if I were doing it alone, I would figure anything in the range of 10 to 15 grams would be good enough, so I hasten to add that each one will be precisely 15 grams, no more, no less, since I'm doing it for him.  He looks relieved, but I notice he keeps one eye on the scale.

Woody even brought his own little glass along from New Jersey in case I didn't have exactly the right thing.  He also brought his own cocoa.  Remember how we when we made the Pavarotti, we all agreed you had to have the very best cocoa you could afford?  I asked Woody what kind of cocoa he used, and he told me he just dumps the last bits of any kind of cocoa they have on hand in a jar, so Woody's Special Cocoa is dribs and drabs of anything.  So much for exactitude.

When they're ready to go in the oven, you can see that they're slightly askew because Woody didn't press down on the glass completely evenly.

But, as you can see, it makes not the slightest bit of difference, because they're perfectly even when they flatten out in the oven.

What I didn't get a picture of, because I think by the time this happened, Jim had put down his camera and he and Woody were drinking beer together, was the final product.  Woody had decided that he'd fill the cookies with vanilla buttercream and make a Hydrox-like cookie--an Oriolo Oreo.  It was so delicious that it made the plain Oriolos seem a little--well, plain.  Luckily for us, Woody's filled cookies were gobbled up at his event, so we didn't have too much temptation around the house.

I managed to freeze enough to use in the Bourbon Pecan Butter Balls, and I hope I don't forget about them by the time we get to that recipe.  If you don't want to freeze them for future use, and don't feel like filling them, I'll bet they'll get eaten anyway.