Instructions

1. 1. sift cocoa into bowl, then add flour and salt. set aside.
2. 2. cream butter (or margarine whichever you use) and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg, vanilla and instant espresso poweder. Mix till well blended. Use paddle for this.
3. 3. With mixer on low, add flour mixture gradually to the creamed mixture until the two are throughly blended.
4. 4. At this point you need to check your dough. Due to humidity, you may or may not need a bit more flour. I have been making roll out cookies long enough to know how the dough should feel. It shouldnt feel too wet or look too crumbly in the bowl. If you put your hand in the bowl, just pull out a piece and get a feel for the sticky factor. I am finding that using margarine makes it far more easy to work with dough. I was a butter die hard forever, but have since decided margarine makes it easier to work with the dough with no taste difference as far as I can see. I would use stick margarine of good quality like blue bonnet. I must note I am a serious ingredient snob, I spend 10.00 a bar on varlhona chocolate just for a certain frosting I make. But I really like how the margarine is working in the cookies. For this recipe I used about an extra 2-3 tbs of flour, to get what I felt was the consistancy I needed.
5. At this point you can chill the dough.
6. I didnt, it rollled out beautiful from the start. I ust a Roul’pat, and nothing stuck at all. I cut out my shapes, then put them on the silpats, and placed the trays in the freezer for about 5-8 min, (as long as it took me to roll out the second tray of cookies) then popped them into the oven.
7. Bake at 350 12-16 min depending on size and thickness
8. Length of time is going to depend on the size of your cookie.
9. Smaller cookies cook faster than larger ones. Always try to keep the same size cookies on the sheet together. Cookies cook from the outside in. Another factor is going to be how thick the cookies are. And how hot your oven runs. Never trust a recipe in how long to cook a cookie. Cookies will cook for 5 more min after pulling out of an oven. Its called carry over cooking. Plus unless you have recently calibrated your oven, you cannot be positive on how hot it is running.
10. For me I can tell by smell and once I am sure the doughy texture is about gone. I then pull them out and let them sit on the sheet for about 2-3 min, then throw them on the rack to finish cooking. I would say for the large cake cut out cookies I made, at over 1/4 of an inch thick, I probably cooked them about 10 min easy. Not much longer.
11. Have fun these taste awesome, and if you use the hersheys Dark chocolate, you will have beautiful black cutouts that taste wonderful!