Happy Earth Day, Recycle That Chocolate!

Easter has come and gone and your leftover chocolate bunnies are probably nibbled down to their waist by now. My chocolate Easter Bunny, dubbed ?The Professor,? stands at a whopping foot and a half tall. It isn?t Easter without a cute, cuddly animal-shaped confection. In this case, he?s an avid reader to boot!

Once the ears bite the dust, I start to get sick of all that super sweet chocolate. I decided to make these Milk Chocolate Chunk Cookies to use up the leftover bunny parts. I swiped this recipe from eatingwell.com and substituted the chocolate chips for chunks of chopped up Easter chocolate. I used salted butter and found that the finished product was a tad on the salty side. I might consider using unsalted butter, or dropping the added salt to ¼ teaspoon.

It?s really hard to pass off a light cookie as a real cookie, but these come fairly close. They?re made with whole wheat flour and ground up oatmeal so they almost taste like an oatmeal cookie without the oatmeal cookie spices (cinnamon or nutmeg). They?re a tad on the dense side, but the outside of the cookie crisps up and the inside stays nice and soft like every good cookie should. My mother-in-law thought they were great for dunking in coffee or milk if you?re the dunking type. I prefer mine to steer clear of a beverage bath. The soggy crumbs in the bottom of the glass after a dunk-fest give me the creeps!

If you want something sweet and you bust that bunny out of its cellophane package, you?re likely to nibble away until you?ve probably consumed hundreds of calories worth of candy. You can have one of these cookies for only 99 calories and enjoy a piece of chocolate and a baked good simultaneously. Not a bad deal. Who needs those stinkin 100 calories packs from the supermarket? To top it off, the whole grains offer an added fiber and protein boost to the snack.

* Get cooking. Let me know what you think. Love it? Hate it? I?m interested in hearing your feedback and suggestions.