Chunky geisha almond cookies

This evening we are having a little "Before Christmas" party with my friends. I really had some trouble in thinking what should I bake and bring there. When I remembered I had bought finnish Fazer's Geisha chocolate for baking I decided to make these wonderfully big and delicious cookies. The original recipe is from a GoodFood magazine, but I've changed it a bit. I used different chocolate, sugar and nuts. The original recipe is good too, but I wanted to try something new. These cookies are really easy to make, and I love the ingredients (what could be better than chocolate and nuts?) and I love the way the cookies look (so BIG and beautiful and of course they taste just great. So you can change the recipe using different nuts or chocolate if you want, just keep the amounts of the ingredients the same. I really recommend these, it's impossible to fail with this recipe!

Ingredients:

about 200g Geisha chocolate

100g butter, chopped (I used 1 dl baking margarine made from rape oil)

1 dl dark muscovado sugar

1 tsp vanilla sugar

1 egg

100g whole almonds

1 1/2 dl plain flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1. Heat oven to 180°C degrees. Melt 130g of Geisha chocolate in a small kettle which is inside a bigger kettle with simmering water, until the chocolate is a smooth liquid. 

2. Beat the egg with a mixer until it's fluffy.

3. Add the butter and the sugars to the chocolate mixture and combine the two mixtures, mix well until smooth.

4. In a bigger bowl combine the flour, 1/3 of the almonds and the bicarbonate of soda. 

5. Mix well, then beat in the chocolate-egg mixture. 

6. Mix well, then add the rest of the chocolate (65g, chop it into smaller chunks first) and mix again. 

7. Take two baking sheets, heap about 12 spoonfuls of the cookie mixture on them spaced apart (the dough spreads a lot, so you can make quite tiny spoonfuls) and don't spread the mixture. 

8. Then poke in the reserved 2/3 of the almonds. 

9. Bake for about 12 minutes, and let the cookies cool on the sheets for at least 20 minutes. If you try to take them away from the sheets too early you easily break them.