Around the beginning of November, my mom told me one morning that she wanted me to bake desserts for Thanksgiving. This wasn’t news to me since I’ve been baking desserts for my family over a decade. She requested a cheesecake (again, nothing new) and she wanted to indulge herself with a key lime pie. I rolled my eyes and said, “Sure. Just get me some ingredients that we don’t have in the house. I have the chocolate for the cheesecake.” She replied, “Chocolate? For the cheesecake?” I said, “Yes, I want to change things up. I’m tired of making the same [raspberry] cheesecake I’ve been doing for the past several years.”
I still had the bittersweet chocolate baking bar and the cocoa powder from Scharffen Berger (from the previous event they’ve invited me a few months ago) so I should be set. Thing was, I wasn’t planning on making the cookie crust from scratch since my mom kept harassing me multiple times not to waste time by baking – a blatant oxymoron (How can anyone expect desserts made from scratch NOT take time?).
The weekend prior to Thanksgiving, my parents went to their local supermarkets and told me that after visiting three different stores, they don’t carry chocolate wafer cookies. Obviously, I have no choice but to make the cookie crust from scratch now…
My dad, being a sweetheart, offered his help to get his hands dirty for the cookie crust, kneading and mixing the dried ingredients of flour, cocoa powder (admittedly, I used a combination of Valhrona and Scharffen Berger), sugar, baking soda, salt and lots of butter, until it becomes a large blob of cocoa scented dough. Then I sealed it up in plastic wrap, place it in the fridge until Wednesday evening when I have to bake everything off so it can be consumed on Thanksgiving.
Making the TKO cookie dough and the dough blobs
On Thanksgiving eve, I had to roll out the cookie dough into sheets (it’s from the TKO cookie recipe found within the Essence of Chocolate book) and bake it off until it’s hardened and dry but not burnt.
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. To those of you who follow or actually look at my Flickr photos, I did attend to their 
