It is / was Labour Day aka the most official student drinking holiday in Finland which includes activities such as drinking sparkling wine at the fountain in the sun on the university yard at noon, being in public wearing our silly high school graduation hats without anyone thinking you're missing a few screws in your head, having picnic, blowing balloons and just having fun in general. So for the picnic i decided to bake something, since i haven't had the chance to do much cooking in a while. In the last month i've spent maybe a week at home and the rest of the time i've been away here and there.

I created this double... wait... triple... (quadruple...?) chocolate cookie recipe and i didn't want the chocolate to just be in chips but proper chunks instead. Hence the name.

 

Chocolate chunk cookies:

- 2,5 dl wheat flour

- 1/2 tsp baking powder

- 1/2 tsp baking soda

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 100 g margarine or butter

- 1,5 dl dark cane sugar

- 2 eggs

- 3 tbsp dark cocoa powder

- 1/2 tsp vanilla flavour

- 50 g dark chocolate

- 30 g dark chocolate chopped

- 30 g milk chocolate chopped

- 30 g white chocolate chopped

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celcius. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cocoa powder together in a bowl. Melt the margarine or butter in a saucepan together with the 50 g of dark chocolate and let the mixture cool a while. Whip the cane sugar, eggs and vanilla flavour together in a bowl until fluffy. Mix in the margarine-chocolate mixture and sieve in the dry ingredients. In the end mix in the chopped chocolates.

Put rather large lumps of the batter on two oven pans quite scarcely. I had six on each. The cookies will swell and take up a lot of space. Bake for 12 - 15 mins depending on your oven.

Serve with some tea or coffee, or with some ice cold home made lemonade. I also made that for the picnic.

 

Home made lemonade (2 - 4 l):

- 6 -7 lemons

- water

- 3 dl sugar

Squeeze the lemons and sieve the juice (i got about 5,5 dl from my 6 or 7 lemons) if you don't want your juice to have any pulp in it. Measure the amount of lemon juice and add as much water as there is lemon juice. Put 1 dl of water in a saucepan with the sugar and bring to a boil to make a simple sugar syrup (so the sugar will be evenly diluted in your lemonade and not fall to the bottom). Mix the syrup in the lemonade. Cool like this or add as much water as you wish to make the lemonade right for your taste.

You can vary the lemonade by adding some other fruit juices in it. The recipe is for the original lemon lemonade, but for example lime and orange can bring a nice twist to the old favourite.

Cool the lemonade in the fridge and serve like that or with some ice, or bottle it and put the bottle in the freezer for a few hours until ice chips have started to form and the lemonade has turned a bit slushy. This is how i took my lemonade to the picnic. It helps it to stay cool longer and you won't dilute the lemonade further since you're not adding water as ice.

The lemonade is best on the day it's made, but it will stay good for a few more days if necessary.

 

Suklaakeksit - Suklaapiparit - Kotitekoinen limonadi - Sitruuna