I just needed the right excuse!

When I saw this cookie posted on Brownie Points in June, it intrigued me. A chocolate meringue cookie that was very chocolately and decadent. Most meringue cookies are just meringue, which, while I like, if I was making a chocolate one, I wanted it to taste like chocolate, not meringue!

I kept the website in my head, sometimes referring back to it, rereading it, then going on to make something else.

I must have gone back and read that recipe a dozen times before yesterday, when I finally printed it off and headed down to my kitchen.

As the title says, I just needed the right excuse.

The excuse, in this case, was a friend in need of comfort food, chocolate. If you can't bake a batch of chocolate cookies on a hot day when they are needed, what kind of friend are you?

The name of these cookies, Melting Chocolate Meringue, is very appropriate. These cookies do melt in your mouth, releasing a deep chocolate flavor. I could not eat more than 2 in a row of these, they were that rich!

They mixed up very quickly, though it turns out I did not have 6 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate, I only had 4, so I substituted 2 ounces of dark chocolate for amount I was missing. I think this was actually a good substitute as it reduced the sweetness of the chocolate, while not affecting the over all chocolateness of them. Using all semi-sweet would probably have been too sweet, and I don't like bittersweet or dark, so using the full amount of either of those would not have made them palatable. At least to me.

This recipe only makes about 2 dozen smallish cookies, which is all you need. They provide enough of a chocolate fix that one or two are enough to supply all your chocolate needs.

I've had two requests for the recipe for this cookie already, as well as a request to keep my friend supplied indefinitely, so I think they were worth turning on my oven on yet another hot summer day.