Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

For a Girl Scout dinner, Claire volunteered "us" to bring a batch of Nana Cookies for dessert. Nana Cookies are chocolate crinkle cookies, so named because a family recipe for them came from Karen's mom. I like that recipe, but have wondered about other recipes for this type of cookie, mostly because the traditional Nana Cookie dough is very sticky and can be difficult to work with. When my assignment came up, I decided to try a recipe from Shirley Corriher's new book, BakeWise. For her recipe, one intriguing aspect is rolling the balls of chocolate cookie dough first in granulated sugar, then in powdered sugar. Corriher suggests that this helps more powdered sugar to adhere to the cookies.

I can't argue that more powdered sugar stayed on the cookies, giving them a higher contrast between chocolate and sugared sections. This dough was very easy to work with, too. However, the cookies are alarmingly sweet -- almost painfully sweet. I think that the use of semisweet chocolate in the dough combined with the amount of sugar in the dough (2.5 cups) is too much. I am now interested in making this recipe again, but substituting unsweetened chocolate for part of the semisweet.