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 :)
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