A few important lessons learned this night.

One: you cannot just replace flour with cocoa because you want a thing to be more chocolatey (and you have no scales, so quantities are more like guidelines), and "they're all dry ingredients anyway, right?"

Wrong.

If you want the cookie dough to keep its shape between worktop and baking tray (and you prooobably do), you need both extensibility and elasticity. Cocoa has neither. Flour has both.

Two: there is extensive science out there. With a sense of despair and 2 am-ness, I googled "how to make dough more elastic", and I got whole dissertations about bread and pizza dough. I had been hoping for an easy answer such as "add more egg" or "add more butter" (because these were things I had to hand and seemed easy enough to mix).

I was able to rescue the thing, more or less, by adding water (thanks to sarken), egg (my fixed idea), and finally, counterintuitively for a dough that started out as too dry, flour.

Three: Recipe bloggers are out there for a reason. They tried this stuff so you don't have to. Don't even think about getting creative ("I'll just use brown sugar because that's what I have", "hey let's put more cocoa because chocolate yum") until you have a feel for how these things work.

(Three prime: Definitely don't get creative at 11 pm. No, really, I know it seems like such a great idea and a unique opportunity to finally use those Tetris shaped cookie cutters you've had for ages, but the lesson of programming - there's no such thing as "let's just" - is a lesson of life.)

As I have said elsewhere, I think I've fully earned my Arthur Shappey Cooking Badge. Now, to catch the 10:30 train for the picnic that was my whole motivation for all this...

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