Double Peanut & Chocolate Cookies

Double Peanut & Chocolate cookies

These cookies are deliciously sweet & nutty with a hint of salt, crisp on the edges and chewy in the middle just like a cookie should be.

Makes approx 20 cookies

Ingredients

115g soft unsalted butter

125g crunchy peanut butter
140g light muscavado sugar
1 large egg, beaten
½ tsp vanilla extract
225g self raising flour
100g good quality chocolate of your choice chopped into chunks (I chose a Green & Black’s bar with almonds for even more nuttiness)
150g roasted salted peanuts

·         Preheat the oven to 180c & lightly grease, or line with parchment several baking trays.

·         Put all the ingredient, except the peanuts into a bowl and mix well with a wooden spoon,  or you can throw it all into your mixer for a minute if you have one, until you have a well combined and formed dough

·         Sprinkle the peanuts into a shallow dish

·         Take ‘ferrero rocher’ sized ball of dough, roll into balls and then gently press them into the peanuts, so you get a nice coating on each ball.

·         Arrange well spaced out on the baking trays (peanut side up)

·         Bake for 15mins until light golden brown

·         Leave to cool on the trays for a couple of minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

·         Enjoy!

·         These will keep in an airtight container for 2-3 days or can be frozen for up to a month.

Melting Moments (From my Mother’s recipe book)

Melting Moments (From my Mother’s recipe book)

Hunting for something in my mother house the other day, which always proves a challenge as every nook and cranny seems to be full of something or other, I stumbled across her recipe book...needless to say the hunt stopped and I got engrossed in it, I came across a recipe for Melting Moments and memories of my childhood came flooding back, these are delicious little crumbly biscuits/cookies that melt in you mouth when you eat them - hence the name.
My mother, who is still truly alive and kicking seems to have given up cooking lately in favour of beading, so instead of asking her to bake a batch, the dog-eared, falling apart at the seams book came with me to the kitchen and these are what emerged.....

Ingredients (makes 18-20)

1 cup or porridge oats

1 teaspoon golden syrup

3 teaspoons boiling water

3 oz sugar (85g)

4 oz self-raising flour (113g)

4 oz unsalted butter (113g)

½ teaspoon baking powder

Few drops of vanilla extract.

Method

Preheat the oven to 170°c

Cream the butter and sugar with a whisk or in a mixer (or by hand, if you’re felling energetic!)

Add the syrup & boiling water and mix

Mix in the oats, flour and vanilla

Roll into small balls or use a small cookie scoop and place on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper, space them approx 3-4cm apart

If you want, pop half a glace cherry on top of each ball and push down gently (the cherries are purely optional, I used them as a retro touch in homage to my mother who wrote the recipe in the 70’s)

Bake in the oven for 15 minutes or till golden brown

Remove from the oven and leave the on the tray for a few minute to ‘set’ then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!

The Cookie (no more explanation required!)

The Cookie

(adapted from Gesine Bullock Prado)

Ingredients (makes approx 20 large cookies)

2 ½ cups all purpose flour
¼  cup bread flour
2 cups packed dark brown sugar
2 eggs
1 large egg white
11 ounces  unsalted butter

2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder

Add ins

I divide the dough in half, putting 1½  cup chocolate chips in one and ½ cup each of chopped pecan nuts, dried cranberries and white chocolate chips in the other.
(you can choose what you want to put in these but work on 1½ cups of add ins per half of the dough, so if you’re making all choc chip...3 cups.)

Procedure
preheat oven to 180º

-Cream together butter and sugar.
-Add eggs and egg white, one at a time.
-whisk together dry ingredients and slowly add to the mixer, being VERY careful not to over mix.
-fold in the add ins
-Use a  large cookie/ice cream scoop, space the cookies 3 inches apart.  Then flatten them with the palm of your hand (this works best if your palm is wet, so the dough doesn’t stick to you!).

-Bake the cookies for 15 minutes or until slightly golden

For a good chewy cookie here's the trick....during the baking, about every 5 minutes, open the oven and take the cookie sheet from the oven and SLAM it down on the counter and put straight back in the oven.  You see,  the cookies start to puff a little (of course they are, they have leavening in them) so to keep them  CHEWY and flat  slam that cookie sheet every 5 mins to counteract the leavening puff.  

Sounds crazy, but it works!