When the skies go dark and the rain pours so heavily that it bounces and seems to be raining from the ground as well as the sky, when the biggest umbrella won’t even keep you dry, this is when I want these chewy and intensely chocolatey, buttery, sugary cookies.

Why?

Because leaving the house for ingredients is not an option. With this recipe, you’re bound to have what you need in the cupboards already and even if you don’t, you can easily adapt it: replace dark chocolate for milk (just make sure you choose milk chocolate with a high cocoa content), or swap the chocolate for dried fruit and nuts instead, or if the cupboards are really bare, go without a filling and you’ll still enjoy sweet buttery chewy cookies.

After five days of sunshine last week, this week’s weather has been resolutely British: non-stop drizzle. In our house, rainy days call for lugging the duvet downstairs, climbing on the couch and snuggling under the covers with something good on the TV (we’re binge-watching Netflix’s Master of None at the minute, mainly so we can reminisce about places and restaurants we’ve been to in New York. Does anyone else do that?) with a huge cup of tea and a plate of still-warm-from-the-oven cookies to share.

These chocolate chunk cookies are best warm when they’re soft and chewy and oozing with puddles of dark chocolate. Just watch out for chocolatey fingers on those duvet covers, especially if you’re a white bed linen fanatic like me.

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Chewy Chocolate Chunk Cookies for Rainy Days

Adapted from Edd Kimber’s, The Boy Who Bakes

Ingredients – for 12 cookies (I usually split the dough and freeze half in preparation for the next rainy day)

Butter, room temperature and cubed, 110g
Golden Caster Sugar, 110g
Light Brown Sugar, 110g
Plain Flour, 250g
Bicarbonate of Soda, 1/2 tsp
Baking Powder, 1/2 tsp
Salt, 1/2 tsp
Vanilla Extract, 1/2 tsp
Egg, whisked, 1
Dark Chocolate, chopped in to 1cm pieces, 150g

Method

1
Beat together the sugars and butter until smooth. Add the vanilla extract and beat until fully incorporated. Whisk the egg in a bowl and then gradually beat this in to the mix.

2
In a separate bowl, mix the flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder. Add the flour, in three additions, to the batter beating well between each addition until a smooth dough forms.

3
Using a metal spoon, stir the chocolate chunks (and any little bits) in to the cookie dough. The dough will be heavy but keep cutting and stirring until the chocolate is evenly distributed; it’s a good arm workout!

4
Spoon the dough on to a sheet of cling film. Wrap in to a ball and chill for as long as you can wait (at least twenty minutes, but it’s best if you can leave it overnight).

5
Remove the dough from the fridge. Using your hands, or an ice-cream scoop, form balls of dough (around 60g each) and place these evenly spread out on a baking sheet on a baking tray, leaving enough room for them to grow to around 15cm.

6

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 160°C (F) for 15-18 minutes until cracking on the top and golden. You might want to turn the tray half way through baking. Leave the cookies to cool for ten minutes before eating. It’s a struggle, I know, but the cookies become chewier and the chocolate cools slightly to a warm melty mess, so it really is worth it.