Nigella's Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

I had an egg and half a tub of margarine left. So I went on a cookie recipe hunt.

You see, after leaving the cake in the kitchen last week and then mentioning this to my classmates, they said "Oh, you should have said, we'd have eaten some!"

The problem is cake isn't inherently portable in its complete form (I learnt this from carting countless maths cakes to school on a double decker public bus). So I had a think about what's more portable.

Cookies!


Then I hit a bit of a snag. So many of the recipes floating around seemed to use brown sugar and two eggs. Well, I had a lot of caster sugar and only one egg. When I stumbled upon Nigella's recipe I was overjoyed by the uni-eggular goodness, though less pleased by the 75g of light brown sugar. Tesco's is a 20 minute walk in each direction and it's freezing!

Yahoo answers came to the rescue, assuring me that I'd probably just lose some of the dark, molasses-sy taste (although I do remember reading another recipe saying something about brown sugar helping with moistness) and set about making them.


These cookies will finish off your leftovers before you go home for Xmas


Recipe from Nigella.com

• 125g dark chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa solids
• 150g flour
• 30g cocoa, sieved
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 125g soft butter
• 75g light brown sugar (if you don't have any just substitute it for caster, worked fine for me)
• 50g white sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg, cold from the fridge
• 350g (2 bags) semi-sweet chocolate morsels or dark chocolate chips

Before setting out for the kitchen I decided that I might as well cut up the chocolate in my room rather than lug my chopping board up to the kitchen. Well, I'm not sure the cleaner will thank me tomorrow... Hard chocolate and a rubbish knife = chocolate shooting off at amazing angles faster than a speeding bullet. Not to mention the shavings going everywhere too...

But then I chanced upon an ingenious solution! Is it wrong to be actually proud of this?

Yes, it probably is :P 

Anyway, on with the cooking. I did only use 200g of chocolate chips instead of the 350g recommended by Nigella, and it seems to have been plenty. Also, I used half white chocolate and half milk chocolate, seeing as the main cookie is a very dark, intense cookie. I then went on to weigh the dry ingredients (bar the cocoa, I got the feeling getting that on the floor might be just a bit too much for the cleaner's patience, and the sugar, because that gets added separately) and then lugged my little pots of chocolate chips and everything else up to the kitchen. Yay! Empty.

Tesco currently have the most awesome offer on their own brand dark chocolate - 100g of 74% for 53p, and it works really nicely in recipes. Price of chocolate is often a big stumbling block in recipes for me when they ask for more than just a lil bit, and I have a big plan to make truffles over xmas, which will use up a lot, so I currently have been buying some each time I go shopping... I did have 2.1kg of dark chocolate before I started this recipe :P Slightly less now. That was melted, the cocoa was added to the dry ingredients, and I creamed the sugar and butter. Now, I still don't have a mixer so I did this by hand, and I'd forgotten just how much effort it takes! I remember my Mum letting me do that part when I was a kid, and then watching in awe as she did some super-fast stirs after I'd finished my feeble little-kid efforts... and I'm even more in awe now because it really makes your arms ache! Xmas list: mixer

Next, I cracked my last egg in and felt a bit worried because it didn't look quite right. Well, I'm not dead yet and I even ate some of the dough so it must have been fine really. Then a teaspoon of vanilla extract went in (and luckily these taste nowhere near as vanilla-y as last weeks cake!). Once the dry ingredients went in I started to get slightly concerned about the size of my bowl. Adding in the chocolate chips was a real laugh as the mixture came right up to the top of the bowl and was incredibly stiff - my arm, already dead from the hand creaming of the butter and sugar, nearly went on strike. Stirring those chunks in was NOT an easy task. Xmas list: bigger bowl. 

Time to put them onto the baking tray. I had one tray that fitted 4 cookies (I went nuts on the third round and squeezed 5 on... just) and we only had one oven shelf anyway. Nigella says it makes 12... so that ended up being 3 rounds of cooking, cooling, plating and regreasing. Yes, I have no greaseproof paper but so far everything has survived by simply being greased by some luminous yellow "I can't Believe It's not butter light". I also have no freezer, and therefore no ice cream, and therefore no ice cream scoop, so I was actually quite pleased that I only ended up with 13 - it was difficult to judge quantities!

Now the waiting and the washing up. At home I'm a ridiculously messy cook - here I meticulously clean up after myself so as to not make myself unwelcome in the kitchen :P And lo and behold, someone comes in and decides to roast some garlic in the oven. Luckily, from my tester cookie, it doesn't seem to have infused them with any vampire-repelling odours.

I'm always nervous with cookies because most of the time, when I make cookies, they just seem to spread and spread and spread (e.g. my infamous cow pat cookies). But I opened the oven and was pleasantly surprised.

Yay! They're cookies! They look like cookies! Though they're a lot nobblier than the perfect ones in Nigella's picture. This was my final lot (simply because it was the only time when there was no-one in the kitchen so I didn't feel too embarassed to take a photo) and as you can see, I couldn't be bothered to do another round of cooking - and I didn't have time, I had a yoga class to get to! So little cookie on the left got a bit squished by the monster cookie in the middle...

But overall I'm pretty chuffed with these cookies! I'll definitely make these again, and there are very few recipes that I'd say that about.

They're now all boxed up and ready to be chucked in my bag for tomorrow's lecture :)

Baking and your waistline

I got a message from my little brother earlier that simply said 'what helped you lose weight?'. That's it... not even a capital at the start!


So I got to thinking... what did? I've lost 2 and a half stone in about a year and a half, and the only time I've drastically reduced my calorie intake is the last 8 weeks, at uni. So what did it? Just in case anyone else is interested (in case you're not interested in the other 50,000 'how I lost weight' posts on the net) then here is my list...


1. Think about how many calories are in everything. Set your daily target and try not to go over it. You will quite quickly get good at estimating how many calories are in things. Keep a mental record of everything you eat in your head; you get better and better at remembering things. Always overestimate the calories in things you don't know the exact value for. 

2. Running (though that doesn't help me now... but it did help at the beginning). Any sport that you do regularly, or even just walking or something.

3. Making treats exactly that... treats. I'll have a piece of chocolate, look forward to it, and enjoy it while I'm eating it. Then I'll stop. Have 1 biscuit instead of 2 or 3.

4. ENJOY your food. I'm not going to lie, I think about food a lot! 

5. Bake and then give it away to people.

6. Have breakfast. You won't feel such a strong urge to snack in the morning. Find a breakfast you like and have it every day.

7. Look at pictures of thin people (not stupidly skinny, just skinny). Think about fat people you know when you're about to eat something. Think about whether it's worth the guilt to get the momentary pleasure. Think about how great you'll look thin. Then either don't eat it or eat less of it.

8. Smaller portions! Have a smaller bit of cake and eat it slower. Have the same dinner, just less. That way you don't feel like you're missing out.

9. Still treat yourself to your favourite things- I still have McDonalds sometimes and I really look forward to it, but I'll eat less that day to compensate.

10. Look for little substitutions - Walker's baked crisps instead of normal ones, or the light cereal bars I have. But this won't work if you don't actually like the substitution. 

11. Learn to like diet coke. Fizzy drinks are empty calories. There really isn't that much difference and even if you can taste one at first, you won't after a few weeks.


This is a photo of me after losing just over 2 stone... I don't have any photos since coming to uni!

So if you want to lose weight... you can.

Chocolate Fudge Marble Cake Part II: It worked! Ahahahaha :D

I might have overdone the vanilla slightly...

But other than that it came off... well, not without a hitch but at least without any more oven cleaning.

It's a little crumblier than usual too, and I'm not quite sure why, but it's still pretty moreish :D I did go back for a second slither... I'm going to cut myself a piece for tomorrow (a post-dentist treat... although I will just have to stare at it longingly until the anaesthetic wears off) and the rest is going in the communal kitchen and I just hope it gets eaten up!

I took a few more photos too, to better show how to do the marbled effect.

But first, have a revised recipe that will fit nicely into a 21cm pan.

For the sponge
4 oz caster sugar
4 oz margarine/butter
4 oz self-raising flour
2 eggs
1 tbsp baking powder (approx)
2 tbsp cocoa powder (approx)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

For the fudge icing
2oz margarine/butter
2 tbsp milk
2 tbsp cocoa
About 10oz icing sugar?

Marbling the cake

So, like I said, step one is put some vanilla blobs in the pan, with gaps...

Then sift some cocoa into the mixture in the bowl (or I suppose you could use food colouring instead! I really want to try a red marble sometime... maybe red and green for xmas? Or would that just merge into the horrible sludge colour you get when you mix too much paint together...?)

Anyway, now place the chocolate bits around and on the vanilla, filling all the gaps. I had a bit less chocolate than vanilla in the end, but it's better than being the other way round because the chocolate tends to dominate.

Then give your mixture one good swirl and carefully level off the cake if you feel a need to... It is quite a thick mixture!

Hey presto... marble! People are always very impressed and want to know the secret ;)

Anyway, out it came and I was pretty chuffed!

Until I looked at it from a different angle...

Excuse me, why did you sink like that? Ah well, like I said, this cake is forgiving... a little fudge icing and no-one's the wiser ;)

I took it back to my room after icing so I could take photos and eat in peace ;) I do feel a bit silly taking photos of stuff in the kitchen... so far no-one has walked in! You wouldn't believe the mess the plate was in after icing, it took a few paper towels to get the excess icing off the white plate...

I got my slice and, apart from the aforementioned vanilla-y-ness, it was fine. Not the best one I've ever made, perhaps not as moist as usual either, but I think I did leave it in the oven a tad too long. I'm very used to having an oven with a window at home so not being able to see what's going on is quite scary for me!

Et voila. It will now be taken back to the kitchen, with a note attached, begging people to eat it! I don't want it sitting in here tempting me with it's siren call...

By the way, you know I called this 'the cake that will make you friends'? It did! The first person that came in asked what I was making and then offered to let me borrow her mixer and a larger bowl! It really made the cake all the sweeter ;) So baking does seem to be doing it's job... making me stay in the kitchen and talk to (some) of the people who come in.

Don't I have my own mixer? Weee-ell... no. I came to uni having been told that the kitchen situation would be dire (it is, it's one between about 12 people and we're very very lucky to have an oven) so I decided not to bring any baking equipment with me. So what prompted me to start baking again? Two lovely American bakers who did a book signing at our local Waterstones, and I shall talk about that in my next post...

Chocolate Fudge Marble Cake: The cake that never fails... except today!

Oh, I thought it would be so simple.

My stalwart, standard cake. If it sinks, the icing hides it. If it rises, it looks even better. When you cut it open, people are always amazed by the pattern, yet you know it's so simple to do. It never, ever, goes wrong and is perfect to take into work, or school... Mum used to make it for school fetes and the like, and then taught me how to do the marble effect, and it still amazes me how something so simple can impress people so easily! :P

So I learned some very important things today - some important baking lessons AND that the infalliable cake is actually falliable...

Well, actually, it isn't, I am, and I really knew that already :P

But the most important lesson is this - follow your gut instinct with mixture sizes, and when you get a new pan, be prepared to maybe get it wrong... better to make too little than too much.

This cake will make you friends


A store-cupboard cake that will never do you wrong. People love the marble effect and it's so easy to jazz up with simple toppings. Quick, simple and, above all, forgiving!


For the sponge
6 oz caster sugar
6 oz margarine/butter
6 oz self-raising flour
3 eggs
1 tbsp baking powder (approx)
2 tbsp cocoa powder (approx)
1 tsp vanilla extract

For the fudge icing
2oz margarine/butter
2 tbsp milk
2 tbsp cocoa
About 10oz icing sugar?

Cream the butter and sugar together. Crack 3 eggs in, mixing with each addition. Sift in the SR flour and baking powder (I say 1 tbsp but I change it every time and always forget what works best!) and fold. Mix in the vanilla extract.

Now get your greased, lined tin and scoop half the mixture into it with a tablespoon, in blobs kept slightly apart, with gaps in between. It doesn't matter if some blobs run together.

Sift in enough cocoa to the remaining mixture to turn it brown - not a very dark brown but not too light either, it's your preference really - and mix. Place the remaining mix in the gaps and anywhere else you can fit it!

Then give this mixture in the pan one swirl - resist the temptation to do more or it'll all just mix together.

Pop it in the oven for about 25-30 mins (180 degrees in a fan one)- might need more, I forget! You'll know when it's done, it tends to spring back beautifully and rise nicely.

A quick note about pans - mine today was a failure because I was using a new 21cm pan and this was too much mixture for it, so it went everywhere and involved a lot of oven cleaning and burning smells in my halls of residence - not a good start to my uni cooking adventures! I think the one I use at home is 23cm and a lot deeper. You can always change the ratios in this to 4/4/4/2 instead (butter/sugar/flour/eggs).

Take out and leave to cool. For the fudge icing, put the butter in a saucepan and melt it. Take off the heat and add the milk and cocoa, then start to sift in icing sugar until it's a fairly runny consistency still but will gloop enough to stick to the cake :P The cocoa is also personal preference... I ALWAYS use green & blacks, which very quickly gives you a deep colour and rich flavour. Mum prefers to make the fudge icing dark, the colour of good dark chocolate, whereas I prefer to have more of a milk chocolate colour.

Using the 2/2/2 mix here will sometimes give you enough, but i tend to be a bit more generous with the butter and milk so i know i'll have enough for a big thick layer on the edges of the cake too. If it gets too thick, you can pop it back on the heat (don't forget to stir!) or add a bit more milk - the icing is as forgiving as the cake ;)

Pop anything you want on top. A crumbled flake is nice and easy, or malteasers around the edge always go down a treat (as long as you get the right amount for the number of people you're serving!). I once got a posh box of chocolates and put them round the edge too... experiment with anything you have handy :)

There you are... a super-simple cake that can't go wrong, unless you're me :D

So here I am.

My mouth has been watering all day.

On a whim I clicked on 'best baking blogs'. It's a good job I didn't have any work to do today because I wouldn't have got any done.

Page after page of 'I've got to try that'. Recipes sent to my Mum saying 'Doesn't this look great?' or 'we must make this when I get home'. It starts with one or two - soon I'm just sending them to her to keep track of them myself. I send a chocolate pudding recipe to my boyfriend; we must try it as an alternative to the one we usually bake, I say. I send a donut recipe to my brother. I bookmark about 50 more.

So why aren't I in the kitchen actually baking any of these things? Because I'm to embarrassed to go up there.

Crazy, I know. But I've always been a shy girl. Then I got to university and it's become worse than that. Thoughts of going to the kitchen fill me with a cold dread; my heart starts to beat faster and I feel sick with fear. The worst part is knowing how irrational this fear is. I'm just scared of being in the way of people, or being somewhere I shouldn't, or people judging me. Yep. Crazy.

So I need to stop sitting here and start baking. Even if all I manage before the xmas holidays is my old stalwart the marble cake it will be a step in the right direction! Then I can go home, try all these awesome recipes I'm itching to make, and come back to uni with an arsenal of new recipes under my belt to whip up and share around.

Baking is the only thing that can save me now!