Last night I realized I had half a bar of 90% chocolate laying around, and a desire to make something sweet and time-consuming. I find the 90% slightly too dark to eat by itself, but thought it could add a grown-up edge to some classic dessert.
Another thing about improvisation - once you start, its sometimes difficult to stop. Once I had tweaked a random cookie recipe to compensate for the limiting amounts of other ingredients I had, it was impossible to just add the chocolate. In went some cocoa powder. A fat swipe of creamy peanut butter. A packet of instant coffee.
I came to thirty minutes later with a smudge of dough on the corner of my mouth and three dozen Blackout Cookies on the cooling rack. Now I'm fighting the urge to make some strange, off-kilter ice cream to stuff between pairs of them. Life is hard.