More Cookies – Supermarket Bakery Ones

It's my new gluttonous quest to find the recipe that replicates those chewy bakery cookies that causes me to consume much more fat and sugar than I should. I feel some sort of security with having my cupboards full of the various different coloured sugars and chocolate and also with my fridge full of cold slabs of butter. My previous baking binge was to find the perfect flapjack recipe, which lets face it, has nothing remotely healthy in them. Damn tasty though.

Supermarket Bakery Cookies

• 100 g butter
• 50 g light brown sugar
• 50 g demerara sugar
• 1 tablespoon golden syrup
• 100 g chopped white and dark chocolate or Smarties.
• 150 g self-raising flour (it's this that gives the cookies their crinkle top)

1. Melt the butter and syrup.
2. Add the sugars and beat together.
3. Add the flour followed by the chocolates.
4. Place large spoonfuls on a baking tray and bake at 170º for 9 – 12 minutes, depending on the size of your cookies.
5. The biscuits are cooked when they are a golden brown colour but they look like they aren't quite ready. It's the not quite cooked cookie that gives the chewy quality.

Chewy Choc Chip Cookies

I've just switched on Nigel 'unctuous' Slater and typically it's the one episode I've already seen. I made his burgers with Parmesan (I use minced beef not chicken) numerous times last year and can vouch for them being superb. I would never have thought of putting cheese in a burger, but what a revelation, I became a burger loather to a burger love overnight. And another reason to love burgers it's one of the few things Stu cooks – outside on the decking using the camping stove in almost all weather conditions. (I should add that the burgers get cooked outside as we have no extractor fan not because I don't let him in the kitchen).

Today has been my first marmalade day of 2010. I bought 7 kilos of Seville's for some reason, so that's two more batches to make this week. As always I use Sybil Kapoor's recipe, one batch made with the addition of blackstrap molasses and one with out.

I've also been making cookies; big fat, chewy supermarket bakery cookies. You know the ones stuffed with huge chunks of chocolate and ladened with sugar and butter? After a bit of googling, I found a recipe on Yahoo Answers which seemed to hit the right marks. Here it is:

Chewy Full Fat Cookies
250g all-purpose flour
2g baking soda
3g salt
170g unsalted butter, melted
220g packed dark or light brown sugar
100g granulated sugar
15ml vanilla extract
1 egg
1 egg yolk
335g  chocolate chips; white, dark and milk

DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 165 degrees C. Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.
In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and
white sugar until well blended. Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk
until light and creamy. Mix in the sifted ingredients until just
blended. Stir in the chocolate chips by hand using a wooden spoon. Drop
cookie dough 1/4 cup at a time onto the prepared cookie sheets. Cookies
should be about 3 inches apart.
Bake for 13 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are
lightly toasted. Cool on baking sheets for a 5 minutes before
transferring to wire racks to cool completely.

Lovage and Pancetta Arancini

I made these savory rice balls in May when the lovage leaves were young and tender. The Arancini recipe is taken from Hugh FW's weekly column in the Guardian, but I swapped a few ingredients around, adding the lovage and lemon and pancetta.

Lovage, used as both odour eaters in the Middle Ages and as an aphrodisiac in the 16th Century, has an intense celery like aroma and flavour. It's fabulous stuffed inside a chicken prior to roasting and also great when a small amount of leaves are added to pea and ham soup.

Broad Beans

We've just eaten the first broad beans of the year freshly picked from the our back veggie patch. Damn tasty but the yield seems even lower than usual. Next year I'm taking a leaf out of David Barker's (Wolterton Hall's organic) growing methods and planting the plants close together. My method of generous spacing just makes the low yield even more frustrating as I could have been growing something else in it's place.

Nostalgic Chocolate Chip Biscuits

These biscuits taste just like ones my Mum use to make when we were younger. They are light and crunchy with a buttery taste.

Chocolate + Nut Biscuits

• 70g caster sugar
• 70 demerara sugar
• 125g unsalted butter

Cream together the above ingredients in a bowl.

Add to the creamed ingredients -

• 1 beaten egg
• 60g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
• 60g white chocolate, roughly chopped
• 60g chopped hazelnuts

Mix in –

• 140g plain flour, sieved
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, sieved

Either roll into sausage, wrap in cling film and fridge or place teaspoons of mixture on to baking tray.
Bake at 170ºc for 10 – 12 mins.

I started
writing this on Monday and it's now Saturday. Some people blog
effortlessly but my attempts are always thwarted by something or other.
I have images stacked up in iPhoto, of subjects I want to eulogize
about… one day I'll write about them.

We drove to London on Sunday to visit Simon & Angie at the very successful, 'St Judes in the City' exhibition held at the Bankside Gallery
over the past 10 days. Before we hit the river bank, we took a trip to
Spitalfields to visit the girls Auntie Miranda at her clothes stall in
the market. Just next to Miranda's stall is one of the Leon Restaurants,
a chain of eaterys set up by Allegra McEvedy, Henry Dimbleby and John
Vincent in 2004.  The food is simple, seasonal, inexpensive, wholesome
and tasty and perfect for family outings.

I've been cooking from
the Leon book since Christmas when I received it as I gift. The
Moroccan Meatballs have been eaten a few times, they're good and dead
simple to make.

Here's a quick recipe how to make Meat Balls similar to Leon's:

500g minced lamb
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
lots for freshly ground pepper and sea salt
1 handful of both chopped mint and parsley
1 pitta torn up and soaked in milk
1 good pinch of dried oregano

1. Squeeze the excess milk from the pitta bread and add to a bowl with all of the other ingredients.
2. Using your hands, mix all the ingredients together until well combined.
3. Roll into balls and either char grill as they do at Leon's, fry or bake on silicone sheet in hot oven for 15 minutes.

We
eat ours with either a homemade spicy tomato sauce made from: two tins
of whole plum tomatoes added to a pan which contains browned sliced
garlic cooked in olive oil. Add a cinnamon stick, a pinch of chili
flakes, a pinch of sugar, oregano, salt and black pepper. Reduce until
thick.

Alternatively, serve with rocket leaves, tzakiki, houmous, pitta bread and baked sliced aubergine.

Last week at Jelly Festival

Jelly Festival

This time last week we were serving food to a steady stream of happy cider drunk punters at Jelly Festival, South Creake, Norfolk. The lead up to the festival was a little stressful. I guess the most stressful thing was not knowing what quantities of food to per-order in anticipation of the hopefully hungry festival goers or, how little to order in case the event was a wet wash out. It was both.

The week prior to the event, Stu with the aid of a workshop full of tools and an eye for typography, started to design a sign for our stall. We were selling BBQ sweetcorn with various flavoured butters, garlic bread, BBQ mushrooms drenched in garlic butter served in a toasted baguette and for pudding, chocolate brownies.

sign making in progress

Days before the Saturday event, I foolishly decided to order 14 cases of sweetcorn. That’s 420 cobs. Yikes. I also ordered 40 baguettes and I made 144 servings of Ottolenghi’s brownies. What an over ambitious fool I am. Why didn’t I believe the weather forecast and why didn’t I realise that we could never have manage to sell 420 cobs on the 2 large BBQs even if we were busy from the 12pm start? Still, it was the first time Stu and I had sold food at a stall and also the first time we have ever cooked in the same kitchen/gazebo/field together. We managed to co-ordinate mechanically, and with the help of our dearest friend Rosie who was serving the customers, we did managed to make a slight profit. All thanks to the sunshine though, if the rain hadn’t cleared like it did at 3pm, we would have been in miserable, damp and in gloomy debt but instead, we’re thinking where and when is the next festival? If we do ever repeat this formula, I don’t think I really want to spend Monday morning selling (almost giving away) boxes of sweetcorn to Norwich market stall holders in ‘Apprentice’ style cut your losses sales-girl mode.

our stall

Warm honeyed figs

My Lidls bargain of the day – a box of Israeli green figs, perfectly ripe and very cheap. For 20 figs, the box cost less that a fiver – not bad. I hadn’t dropped in for fruit and veg so to wasn’t paying attention to the goods on offer, but a lovely elderly man proudly showed me his about-to-be-purchased box of figs, saying that this will tide him over until he starts to climb a fig tree for perfectly ripe figs on Elm Hill. He then shared his favourite way of eating them, he said that they are delicious fried with butter.

I’ve just tried his suggestion, adding to the butter; honey, a cinnamon
stick and a squeeze of lemon. I then dolloped on a heap of Greek yogurt
and drizzle of honey. I liked them a lot.

Play and Freeze

Make ice-cream with no mess, no electricity but possibly a broken toe….

Apart from the almost injuries, Play and Freeze is brilliant and a must have for anyone with a team of energetic helpers and ice-cream lovers. Fi, clever ol’ Fi, turned up to the campsite with an early birthday gift of ice, rock salt, cream, vanilla sugar and chocolate chips and a large cube wrapped in paper – the Play and Freeze.

We’ve tried a few flavours, so far raspberries, cream and Greek yogurt is really good. I’ve been making a banana cake lately which requires the bananas to be cooked in a butterscotch sauce. I can’t stop thinking about how tasty caramelised bananas would be when added with cream and Greek yogurt to the ice-cream ball. For now, here’s how we made raspberry ripple.

Firstly, add ice-cubes and rock salt to one end.

To the end end, add cream…raspberries, Greek yogurt, vanilla sugar and milk

Then roll it, kick it (gently) drag it, fight over it for ten whole minutes, stirring it a few times.

then eat it.

bad cooking day

Both girls are asleep. Bliss. There is no Cbleedin-beebies on the TV only I have just realised I have been happily singing a long to the irritating Cbeebies programmes on Radio 7. Arhhhh. It worries me that when I turn on the TV, the channel I instantly punch into the hand controls is 617 (yes, you’ve guessed it, CBeebies). And now here I am indulging in some guilt free Internet activity whilst singing along Balamory. Time for some music…

I’m having a bad cooking day today. The chocolate crispies I made with Evie earlier went all grainy and I’ve just melted 200g of quality chocolate, heated a good glug of double cream with cardamom and orange peel to infuse, with the intention of making truffles for Easter gifts. Only the bloody stuff has ‘seized’ (also gone grainy) and there is no way of recovering it. I’m always so careful never to get any moisture in chocolate but I guess that is what has happened. Damn and blast it.

So not to waste my thick and disastrous truffle mix, I thought I’d try and fudge it into some kind of brownie concoction. I added eggs, caster sugar and ground almonds and some more melted butter and poured it into a shallow cake tin. It’s now baked and looks alright, if a little oily (I don’t think I combined the mixture very well, my enthusiasm for the chocolate gloop was fading fast).

Taste verdict – Matilda has scoffed a huge piece and is now bouncing of the walls and Stu likes the cardamom. All has not been wasted.