Cookie tray bake

Hard to believe that its been almost two years since my last update here, despite having been busy cooking, I don't seem to have found the time. Now we are well and truly on lock-down here in the UK, I am finding a bit more time (not a whole lot more, I should add, given as we have two kids in the house that need entertaining, most of my additional time locked in is quite quickly filled).

One recipe that I have bene playing with is a cookie tray-bake. It's simple, quick and good to do with kids. I was originally playing with the idea of more extravagant versions of this (mini eggs etc in them), but given shop trips are limited, I have kept it simple.

Another good thing about the tray bake approach is you can cut the slices as big or as small as you like, so can easily get child friendly slice sizes (I never manage to make small cookies!).

Ingredients

• 170 grams unsalted butter
• 100 grams granulated sugar
• 160 grams light brown sugar
• 300 grams flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
• 200 grams choc chips
• 1 egg

(Substitutions: as always, feel free to play fast and loose on substitutions - I have recently had an abundance of self-raising flour, so have made the last two batches with that instead of plain flour, with no ill effect. Likewise, I have switched the light brown sugar for dark brown or muscavado - you get a different taste with those, more caramel-treacle-y, which is also nice!)

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar - stick it in a free standing mixer and beat - it should visibly look a lighter colour, and will probably take a couple minutes (for real, leave it mixing for a couple minutes, which will probably feel like a long time)
   
   
2. To ensure an even distribution, I often add the baking powder and bicarb at this point and beat further
   
   
3. Add the egg and beat until its smooth and combined
   
   
4. Add the flour and mix slowly until combined, add the chocolate chips and mix further for 30 seconds or so until distributed throughout
   
   
5. Line a tin with baking paper and press the dough into the tin, and put in the fridge to chill. Overnight if you have time, but a couple hours is fine (to be honest, feel free to cook immediately if you want, it won't be the end of the world)
   
   
6. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 160 Fan (180 or whatever you adjust your non-fan oven to) and bake for 23-25 minutes, turning 2/3 times throughout.
   
   
7. Take out and leave to cool on a rack (still with the baking paper is the easiest), after 5 mins transfer (still in baking paper) to a chopping board and cut into slices as your prefer. Serve immediately with ice cream.

Recipe: Nutella filled cookies

As well as making raspberry & white chocolate cookies on the weekend, I also decided, on a whim, to try and experiment with nutella filled cookies.

I used my normal base cookie recipe, but with milk choc chunks instead of the white chocolate and raspberry (although I did experiment with one nutella filled raspberry-and-white-choc cookie, which was fine, but didn't work as well as the normal choc chunk cookies).

Method

We will be following the same instructions as described here, but before we start, we will line a baking tray, and using a teaspoon put small blobs of nutella on it, and put it in the freezer to harden - this is mostly to make it easier to handle when we try to get it into our cookie later:

Once you have the cookie dough cooled and ready to cook, rather than shaping it into a ball, flatten each piece slightly and then put a piece of the frozen nutella in the center, shaping the dough back into a ball around the nutella competely.

Cook as described and eat!

Recipe: My favourite cookies

This post has now been migrated to the new robbish food website, robbishfood.com - You can check out my Ultimate Choc Chop Cookie post & recipe over there!

As I have mentioned before, one of my favourite sweet combinations is raspberry and chocolate - whether it be milk, dark or white chocolate, it just seems to work so well for me, so unsurprisingly, if not controversially, my favourite cookies are white chocolate and raspberry.

I made them last week, as a sort of practice run for an upcoming birthday party for my youngest, but I am pretty tempted to just keep making them regularly. Although, I am the only one in the house who prefers them to normal chocolate chip cookies, but that probably works in my favour too, as it means more for me (or more likely they don't all get eaten whilst I am out at work).


They are pretty simple, and are actually my go to cookie recipe, but you can replace the raspberries and white choc with plain choc chunks or whatever your mood fancies.

Ingredients

• 170 grams unsalted butter
• 250 grams plain flour
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 100 grams granulated sugar
• 160 grams light brown sugar
• 200 grams white choc chunks
• 10 grams freeze dried raspberries

Method

Preheat oven to 160 degrees. Makes about 15-25 cookies, depending on the size you go for

1. Mix the flour, oats, salt and bicarbonate of soda together in a bowl
   
   
2. Add the sugars and butter in a bowl (ideally of a freestanding mixer, but whatever) and mix well - for a few minutes with the paddle attachment if you have one, but again, whatever. Just mix it well so it is smooth and well beaten
   
   
3. Add the egg and beat/mix again for a minute or so until well combined. Add the vanilla if using it.
   
   
4. Add the flour mixture and beat until combined and formed a cohesive dough. If you are using a free standing mixer, then increase the power slowly, as if you go straight in fast then you will get covered in flour. This has happened more than once to me.
   
   
5. Chuck in the choc chunks and raspberries and mix for another 30sec-1min
   
   
6. Wrap the the dough in clingfilm and stick it in the fridge to cool - probably an hour or so
   
   
7. Once cooled, chunk the dough into small fist size balls and place them equally spaced on a baking tray and cook for about 15minutes, or until  they have melted into cookie shapes and lightly browned.
   
   
8. Take them from the oven, let them cool for a bit

Oat-y shortbread bites

It's been a strange kind of weekend for cooking. For a change, my savoury food has all turned out fairly badly (a made an adhoc couscous sund-dried tomato and mozarella bake, yesterday which I quite enjoyed but didn't quite taste right, and then today I attempted to make an afghan inspired stew but: I mis-judged the spices and it ended up tasting like curried aubergine, my okras got mistakenly thrown away and I hadn't soaked my split peas), but as a pleasant change, my shortbread experiment turned out pretty well.

I have been trying to perfect my brown butter shortbread recipe I have previously posted. As mentioned, I am happy with the taste, but they are incredibly crumbly (to the point of being pretty messy to just pick up), but my repeated attempts to adjust the ratios have been met with continued failure. I am sure that the problem is due to lack of water in the mix, but not able to get the balance right.

Anyway, this weekend, on the Saturday, I was out with the boys and we had some oat-y type shortbread biscuits with dried strawberry in a cafe, which were pretty tasty. So needless to say, when we got up this morning, I decided we should try to work out the recipe.

The first iteration was pretty decent - a little sweeter than I had in mind (I prefer more butter-y flavour in my shortbread) so I think next time I will try with more butter, and more flour to keep the structural integrity) but overall pretty decent.

I also substituted raisins for the strawberries on this occasion, on account of us having millions of raisins and no dried strawberries in the house. Anyway, to the details..

Ingredients

• 90 grams rolled oats
• 125 grams plain flour
• 100 grams caster
• 15 grams light brown sugar
• 180 grams unsalted butter
• raisins
• Pinch salt

Method

1. In a freestand mixer with paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugars until light
   
   
2. add the salt, raisins and oats and mix until combined
   
   
3. Add the flour and gently mix through - either on the lowest speed of the mixer or by hand
   
   
4. wrap in cling film and roll into a tube shaped about 1 inch in diameter (I was going for small, slightly bigger than bitesize biscuits) and cool in the fridge for 30 minutes until set
   
   
5. Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees centigrade, slice the chilled batter into discs about 1/2 inch deep and place on baking tray line with baking paper, cook for about 15-20minutes untill golden brown

Recipe: Raspberry & white choc cookies

There are two reasons I decided to work on a cookie recipe:

1. I am building up to making breakfast cookies (read: cookies with bacon in) and wanted to nail a good oatmeal cookie recipe (feels like a breakfast cookie should be more oatmeal-y no?), and didn't have any bacon.
   
   
2. As mentioned, my parents were up this week, and seemed like a good early morning activity with my older boy before they arrived.

Raspberry is one of my favourite chocolate-complimenting-fruit - works well with big white choc chunks in cookies/cakes/muffins and also works amazing well with dark, dark chocolate.

This recipe is another example of being based massively on availability - there are basics when it comes to cookies - sugars, butter, flour (baking powder), but variations around these that make varying levels of difference to the end result.  The result is a classic american-style cookie, with a brittle crunch to the edge and a soft chewy centre (even better when warm)

Ingredients

• 170g unsalted butter
• 125g self-raising flour (this was because I didn't have any plain flour - normally I would use plain flour + baking powder, but being as that is basically what self-raising flour is, meh)
• 125g rolled oats (porridge oats) - flour is more tightly packed than oats, so if converting to cups then make sure you take that into account
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (also called baking soda)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 100g granulated sugar
• 160g light brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract(optional - I often forget this one)
• 200g white choc chunks
• 7g freeze dried raspberries

Method

Preheat oven to 160 degrees. Makes about 15-25 cookies, depending on the size you go for

1. Mix the flour, oats, salt and bicarbonate of soda together in a bowl
   
   
2. Add the sugars and butter in a bowl (ideally of a freestanding mixer, but whatever) and mix well - for a few minutes with the paddle attachment if you have one, but again, whatever. Just mix it well so it is smooth and well beaten
   
   
3. Add the egg and beat/mix again for a minute or so until well combined. Add the vanilla if using it.
   
   
4. Add the flour mixture and beat until combined and formed a cohesive dough. If you are using a free standing mixer, then increase the power slowly, as if you go straight in fast then you will get covered in flour. This has happened more than once to me.
   
   
5. Chuck in the choc/raspberries (or whatever other choc/filling you are using) and mix for another 30sec-1min
   
   
   
   
6. Wrap the the dough in clingfilm and stick it in the fridge to cool - probably an hour or so (see after thoughts on this point)
   
   
   
   
   
7. Once cooled, chunk the dough into small fist size balls and place them equally spaced on a baking tray and cook for about 15minutes, or until  they have melted into cookie shapes and lightly browned.
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. Take them from the oven, let them cool for a bit- they will sink down and start to look like the familiar, classic cookie look - kind of cracked across the top
   
   
   

After thoughts

•  I didn't nail the oat-cookie ratio. I will try upping the oatmeal ratio next time. It wasn't bad, and you got the oatmeal bite a little, just not like you would on a proper oatmeal cookie. Will up it to 75% oatmeal to 25% flour ratio next time
  
  
• I didn't have either of the sugars listed above - so I substituted caster sugar for granulated and demerara for the light brown sugar. Caster sugar is still granulated, but generally a lot finer, so from a scientific point of view this makes a difference to absorption rates/speed but on this scale, it doesn't make much difference. Same for the brown sugar swap - they are different sugars, and clearly a very different make up (dip your finger in each type and taste it - the granule size, taste etc) - but again, didn't seem to make much difference here
  
  
• My freeze dried raspberries just don't seem to be up to the job. I will try with an alternative on the raspberries.
  
  
• If you make the cookie-dough balls smaller, about the size of a table-tennis ball or smaller, you will get a crunchier, biscuit crunch right the way through the cookie. If you go for balls about the size of a golf ball and bigger you get the classic crunchy-around-the-outside-chewy-and-soft-in-the-center cookie (which I prefer!)
  
  
• The length of the time you keep the dough in the fridge for also effects cookie texture - if you split the dough in half and cook one half after a few hours in the fridge and leave the other half for a day or more, you will notice a difference - the latter being tougher and more crunch throughout