Great Baking, Weird Baking and Spicy Hot Chocolate

This was the kind of desert that made me question why anyone ever puts in the effort to make anything more complicated than a good old rice krispy treat. I used this recipe, but I was afraid to burn the butter so I'm not sure I can technically call these "brown butter rice krispy treats." But nevertheless, they were in a league of their own, especially eaten warm, while the chocolate ganache (ghiradelli chocolate chips, crunchy organic peanut butter and a little half and half) was still melty.


Jen had purchased some limited edition "Pumpkin Spice Hershey's Kisses" from Target and realized why they were on sale after she tried the first one....So we decided to use them up with this recipe, except Jen insisted we use whole-wheat flour. We also substituted honey and maple syrup for molasses, which made our cookies turn out looking like this....
Nevertheless, a warm cookie is a warm cookie, and these babies got eaten right up, no matter how odd they were. They were much more like a breakfast scone and some people enjoyed them with strawberry jam.
For the record, although I do love chocolate pepper cookies, I'm not a fan of chocolate pepper hot cocoa. This was not an intentional experiment. A few weeks back, while I was making said pepper cookies, a fair amount of black pepper had been mixed with some extra cocoa. Instead of throwing the cocoa away, I decided to dump it back in to the container, forgetting about the pepper that was hidden within. Weeks later, when Lucy and I taste-tested our home-made hot chocolate, we could not figure out why the hell it taste so awful. We kept adding more and more sugar until we realized the problem. We decided to drink it anyways, which was a daring decision. And not an experience I would ever like to repeat.