Mexican Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love a good chocolate chip cookie, a little on the crispy side, and not too sweet. I am also not a big fan of nuts in my cookies (although sometimes pecans or peanut butter are just right), so I like to find a little extra flavor in other ingredients. Mexican chocolate, with its addition of cinnamon and a little pepper or chile, is perfect to me. These cookies, adapted from an old Bon Appétit recipe I found on Epicurious, came out wonderfully, with a nice bit of cinnamon spice and a subtle black pepper finish. They also benefited from the unsweetened chocolate to cut the sugar a bit, and the chocolate chips have a softness that juxtaposes the crisp cookies.

• 1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, preferably of high quality such as Scharffen Berger
  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• Black pepper to taste
  
• 10 ounces of bittersweet chocolate chips, Ghirardelli makes great ones

Cream the butter and sugar in large bowl, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add vanilla.

Sift the dry ingredients directly into the bowl, combine until blended, and add chocolate chips and black pepper to taste.

The dough is very fudgey, so it should be refrigerated for about an hour before baking.

Bake on buttered baking sheets (about 9 cookies per standard sheet) for 12 minutes at 350 degrees. Let stand 3-5 minutes before removing the cookies to cool on a rack.

The recipe should make about 50 2 inch cookies.

Bon Appétit's recipe on Epicurious can be found here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Mexican-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies-4808#ixzz1f7JggtD2

Café Habana Goes West

Café Habana in NYC 's Nolita neighborhood is one of the most popular Cuban-Mexican restaurants around, with a perpetual thirty minute wait for a table. The corn alone is worth a visit (to make your own, roll an ear in chili powder, cotija cheese, and lime and throw it on the grill), but so far it has only been available to people in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Now, though, the restaurant is making a leap across the country to two new locations in Venice and Malibu - which will instantly double their number of restaurants. Café Habana has a sustainable way of running the current restaurants, especially evident in the Brooklyn Outpost (read more about their enviromentally friendly practices here: http://www.cafehabana.com/planet.htm), so I was not surprised to see them opening a restaurant in Malibu's Lumberyard, a 'green' shopping center that, incidentally, includes many of the same shops found in Nolita and Soho back East. Looks like Habana will fit right in...