Remember my previous post on Christmas gifts for a friend? I did a cookies mixture in a jar for a friend of mine.
I looked for a recipe that requires the person who receives the gift to add as little of her own liquid ingredients as possible. After all, it’s a gift!
So I set aside recipes from our ‘The Essential Cookie Cookbook’. Most recipes require in addition to the butter and egg, vegetable shortening, vinegar or corn syrup. Don’t take me wrong, the cookies are delicious but I think the recipes don’t suit the concept of the gift.
While searching on the Internet, I came across this recipe from BBC Good Food
What can I say except the recipe was validated by two picky eaters. My children are not picky in the sense they are mono-food eaters.
– What do you want for dinner?
– Pasta, plain pasta please mummy
They love vegetables, especially when stir-fried with a bit of salt, you know when the green is still green and the texture is crunchy? They eat fish – not the breaded fish – the salmon steak still with the skin on, the entire sea bass I steam?
They are picky eaters in the sense it has to taste good, offers different texture. Hell yeah, at four and six, they are fussier than the Masterchef’s jury.
Here is the recipe if you want to stick with me:
Solid ingredients:
- 225 g of plain flour -> I used all purpose flour
- 80 g of light brown muscovado sugar
- 80 g of granulated sugar -> I used cane sugar
- ¼ tsp of salt -> I used pink Himalayan salt
- ½ tsp of bicarbonate of soda
- 200 g of plain chocolate chips -> I used one with 48% cacao and only used 100g
Liqui ingredients:
- 1 large egg
- 2 tsp of vanilla extract*
- 150 of softened salted butter -> I weighed the butter and set it aside on my counter top of my kitchen the evening before
If you don’t have time to wait for the butter to get soft, you can cut it into small cubs and set on a plate. Warm up a salad bowl – like the pyrex salad bowl – in a sink filled with hot water and then place on the plate. The bowl should not come in contact with the butter otherwise the butter will melt and that is not what we want. The heat from the bowl will soften the butter quickly without melting it.
* I have homemade vanilla sugar so I used it instead of the ordinary granulated sugar for my friend. I splitted around ten vanilla beans in half and put them in a jar and cover them with granulated cane sugar. I regularly shake the jar to release the vanilla seeds from the beans.
Directions:
- Preheat your oven at 180 degree Celsius
- I sieved the flour with the bicarbonate of soda in a large bowl
- Add the granulated sugar and the salt
- I used an electric hand mixer to blend the softened butter with the egg and muscovado sugar.
- Then I pour the liquid mixture into the solid one and mix it up with a wooden spoon.
- And finally, I added the chocolate chips. I used only half of the recommended amount because I want to feel the taste of chocolate on my tongue not my fingers. I want to be able to grab my cookie without seeing the chocolate chips melting on my fingers. Yes I have some OCD …
- Lay a parchment paper on a baking tray and with two tablespoons, make small mounds of the mixture and set them in staggered rows like a diamond shape. The mounds will expand while baking; you need to leave sufficient space between them so they don’t stick to each other.
- Depending on your oven, it takes around 8 to 10 minutes to bake. The edges should turn brown while the center is still a bit soft.
Tada, here is the result
I store them in a metal box to retain the crispiness. You can keep them for up to a week – but not sure they could last that long though. If you want to store them for a longer period of time, you can put them in a freezer bag and then in an airtight container. When it comes the moment to eat them, take them out of the freezer the evening before and leave the container on your kitchen counter top.
If you like peanut butter, I would recommend you to replace half of the salted butter with sisal peanut butter creamy or crunchy as you like J
Enjoy!
