Imagine my delight while on a routine Internet surf session, I stumbled upon a gem of a recipe: the ooey-gooey double-chocolate cookies at Milk, a Los Angeles café and dessert hangout just down the street from my favorite breakfast place (Eggs Benedict with Cabernet hollandaise), BLD.

This is one serious cookie, with a whole pound of bittersweet chocolate (and 1/4 pound of unsweetened chocolate) yielding roughly 15 to 18 cookies. They’re slightly underbaked to preserve the ooey-gooey part, and they’re rich – right at the brink of a sensory overload with every bite. My hat is off to you if you can eat more than one.

So the problem here is not in the cookie’s taste. The problem is the way these delectable confections photograph, which is, to put it plainly, not good. To the camera, they look like cowpies, especially right out of the oven. I’ve tried to dress them up in a number of ways to no avail: putting them in a decorative jar, artfully arranging them on a plate, shaping them into round, uniform patties. It’s a mortal sin that something as fantastic as these would look like literal pieces of crap.

My little cowpies aren’t alone in the ugly-food category. There are plenty of other tasty tidbits that the camera disapproves of. Beigefood, for example. Almost anything devoid of colorful veggies or fruit, usually fried and slathered in gravy, does not a pretty picture make. This category also includes anything that looks like it was prepared on an airplane, in a hospital or for a cruise ship buffet. (A plate of chicken fried steak, biscuits, mashed potatoes and country gravy fits this definition to a T.)

Mexican combo platters: Order one of these at any number of Mexican restaurants, and it’ll come sided by refried beans with a plasticky sheet of cheddar and Jack cheeses. Everything else is generously slathered in a red or green sauce. Even if the plate is adorned with a wilted stem of curly-leaf parsley and the ubiquitous, single black olive (or, at some of the true hole-in-the-walls, a fractional sliver of black olive), the resulting photo is on par with the resulting heartburn due after the meal.

Hummus: Love it, but it looks like vomit. Bless our hearts for trying to dress it up with a dusting of paprika.

Spinach and artichoke dip: Adding diced tomatoes to this dish — especially when they’re out of season and practically translucent — helps some in a photo, but not much.

I could go on, but I won’t. (But feel free to link and comment with some of your not-so-photogenic foods). Anyway, please trust me, these cookies are to die for. Click on this link for the recipe from the LA Times Web site.

– Cynthia Furey

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Baking/desserts, Cookies, In the kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.