Nigella's Chocolate Mint Cookies

The other day I realised I hadn't baked in ages and AGES. Trouble is I have stacked on the weight since moving in with my boyfriend, weight that has been stacked on top of weight that shouldn't have been there anyway.

Baking + diets = MISTAKE

But I wanted to bake (the little child within me is stamping her foot at the moment) so bake I did. I sat for longer than was necessary because I needed to find something that I could make with what I had in the kitchen because I didn't want to go out and buy more ingredients (cue stomping child again)

And I found these Chocolate Mint Cookies in Nigella Express,

Ingredients (this makes 26 but I thought of my flab and halved everything and only came out with about 10 although mine were probably bigger than Nigella intended!)

100g soft butter

150g light brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg

150g flour (annoyingly she doesn't bloody tell you what kind of flour she wants you to use - damn you Nigella!! I closed my eyes and picked whatever came to hand - self-raising come on down!)

35g cocoa powder

Half tsp baking powder

200g dark chocolate chips

For the glaze

75g icing sugar

1 tbsp cocoa, sieved

2 tbsp boiling water

teeny tiny drops of peppermint extract (taste it til it feels right)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180c

2. Cream butter and brown sugar and then beat in vanilla extract and the egg

3. Mix flour, cocoas and baking powder in a bowl and gradually beat in to creamed mixture (I feel I should add at this point that the mixture goes all weird and sticks to your beaters causing them not to turn round anymore. Cue real-life stomping girl in the kitchen until boyfriend comes in and explains that cookie dough is supposed to look like that)

4. Fold in the chocolate chips

5. Put little balls of cookie dough mixture on a baking sheet, leaving space between each one

6. Bake in oven for 12 minutes - put them on a cooling rack and put newspaper or tin foil underneath to catch the glaze you're about to pour over them (and get all over your work surfaces if you don't put something down)

7. Put glaze ingredients into saucepan and heat until combined

8. DRIZZLE!!!! (using a teaspoon)

They were pretty marvellous actually and better than I thought they were going to be (I was still sulking about the dough mixture).

I then took them in to work and made all my colleagues eat them so that I don't munch them all - I think they might be wondering if I have some kind of over-eater by-proxy syndrome and am trying to fatten them all up to be like me. As if....