Coffee Chocolate Chunk Cookies (or Ginger for the coffee haters!)

Coffee - yuk!

I have to confess that when this month's guest host for the We Should Cocoa challenge (hosted by Choclette), Lucy, announced that this month's ingredient would be coffee my heart sank. After last month's almonds (allergy alert) I was hoping for something easier and (dare I say it) more inspiring. I really don't like coffee and depending on how the stars are aligned (?!) I sometimes don't even like the smell of coffee. Well, about once a year I fancy a coffee.... tends to be a passing fancy and it generally passes quite quickly without me actually drinking coffee (well, unless I happen to be on holiday in Italy at the time where I may indulge in a frothy cappuccino).

So I've been thinking about this one all month and wondering what on earth I could do to make the stipulated coffee palatable. (Last month I used peanut butter instead of almonds, but in the spirit of the challenge I think that if I can actually ingest something without it making me ill I ought to include it in my ingredients!) And it has now come to the deadline and I've realised that if I'm to participate at all this month I'd better get my skates on.

Ginger - yum!

I'd been thinking of coffee cakes with buttercream, mocha cakes, coffee walnut cakes with a chocolate twist (another forbidden ingredient here!) and all sorts of others, wondering if I could coffee as a background flavour to simply enhance a chocolate flavour but then I hit upon the idea of making a recipe I could split in half - so I wouldn't have to eat the coffee!

Coffee again

Cookies are perfect for this - one half of the batch with the stipulated coffee flavour (to be enjoyed by workmates less fussy than myself) and one half a favoured flavour so that I can justly comment on the texture and balance of the cookie. I found myself a quick and easy cookie recipe (not quite sure where I came across it first, probably on someone's blog) and luckily because it is a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe it is online on the Channel 4 website. (Actually, this is a bad thing because I'd forgotten about the Channel 4 site and will now want to spend lots of time browsing on there instead of doing things I ought to be doing. Hmm.)

I followed Hugh's method for the cookies, which is very quick and easy - not quite the specified ten minutes because I was messing about splitting my batch into two and so forth but still very easy and with the advantage of being able to use fridge cold butter (you melt it) - always good for when you're disorganised and have forgotten to allow the butter to soften, or when you need cookies in short order (and who doesn't at some point need cookies quickly?).

Just five on a sheet

You can find the recipe here. The recipe is also in Hugh's books River Cottage Every Day and Hugh's Family Cookbook. The only changes I made were to increase the flour by 30g to 180g (which I won't do next time as the cookies didn't spread nearly as much as I was expecting from the consistency of the dough, which is worryingly runny) and to use 50g of Green and Black's Espresso chocolate for one half of the dough and 50g Green and Black's Ginger chocolate for the other half. I also had a very small amount of crystallised stem ginger on the countertop, annoying me, so decided to chop that and add it to the ginger half of the dough too - just 15g. I also found that mine needed 12-14 minutes to bake rather than the specified ten, but this could be because I'd added the extra flour and so the cookies didn't spread as much as they should have done and therefore took longer to cook. As you can see I only baked five or six cookies on each tray but could probably have fitted more on. I made 11 ginger cookies and nine coffee ones (I'm obviously not very good at guesstimating how much of the dough was half!)

Yum - ginger!

So, after all of that, what were they like? In a word, delicious! I'm not the best at making cookies or biscuits - I have a strong tendency to overcook them and end up with rather more crispy offerings than were intended by the recipe author - pale becomes golden and golden becomes caramelised dark golden.... These were great - deliciously chewy and soft in the middle with a slightly crispy edge and top crust. I will definitely be making these again and they went down very well at work, both with the coffee lovers and the non-coffee lovers. Having not tasted the coffee ones I can't comment on the balance there, but I will assume that Green and Black's have invested some effort in ensuring that their espresso coffee is delicious, and so I will also assume that cookies made using this chocolate were also delicious. They certainly smelt strongly of coffee.

Melted coffee chocolate - more spread out

I was very impressed with my ginger idea though - the ginger chocolate was great but finding little added bits of crystallised stem ginger in the cookie too was stunning - really enhanced that ginger flavour hit. I may just have been lucky with my cookie but it had lots and lots of ginger bits in it - I think other cookies may have had less and so I think I'll add a bit more next time. Never too much ginger! It was interesting to me that the two chocolates behaved so differently whilst baking - the smooth espresso chocolate spread out widely whereas the ginger chocolate behaved much more sedately and spread only a little. I wonder if this is because the ginger chocolate contains tiny weeny little nuggets of ginger (explanation for those of you who have yet to have the pleasure of eating this chocolate!) that stop the chocolate from spreading too far when it melts? Anyway, roaring success, will be made again. So even though I don't like coffee I'm glad I participated in this challenge because I now have a very successful cookie recipe in my armoury.

As I've used a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe here I'm going to submit this to River Cottage Rocks! which is a challenge I've been meaning to participate in for a while now. It is organised by Jo of Jo's Kitchen and the guest host this month is Charlotte of Charlotte's Kitchen Diary. The theme this month is Baking Bliss - sweet or savoury recipes so long as they are baked!

These would be perfect to make with small children - the fun of mixing everything up by hand, breaking the egg and if the butter is melted in the microwave then no dangerous heat either (I'm not a parent though so parents out there will obviously need to use their judgement and knowledge of your children's skills!). Obviously a grown-up is needed for the actual baking, but the short time between starting and eating is perfect for short attention spans. For these reasons I'm submitting these to Family Friendly Fridays held by Fabulicious Food with guest host Solange at Pebble Soup.

Black Bread - Short and Tweet

This week's selection included suggestions for a number of different breads from @EvidenceMatters - you can find the Short and Tweet schedule for April here. You can find out more about the challenge and how to participate here. So this week's selection included Spelt and Ale loaf (I've just finished my spelt flour!), Walnut loaf (out for obvious reasons round this way), Soya and Linseed Loaf (I have recently baked, but not blogged about a soya containing loaf so didn't want to duplicate the bread in my freezer), Multigrain and Honey loaf and Black Bread. Both of these remaining breads included ingredients I'm really not sure that I'm keen on. I don't really do seeds very much and the Black Bread is full of slightly weird and wonderful ingredients.

Having recently aquired some caraway seeds I decided that it would be the Black Bread for me. Helpfully it didn't require the sponge stage that the multigrain and honey loaf needs. Helpful because I am not organised and have only just finished baking this loaf!

The loaf derives the intense black colour from a mixture of rye flour (although you can choose rye, spelt or wholemeal), black treacle, cocoa powder and instant coffee powder, plus there are additional flavours from the seeds - caraway, fennel and cumin are the suggestions so I decided on caraway. There is also an option on the starchy root vegetable too - carrot is suggested and is what I used, but I'm sure that parsnip, swede, turnip or even potato would work equally well. I guess that with all of these variations each loaf of black bread will be fairly unique to the baker making this particular recipe.

I halved the recipe - partly due to storage issues (again) and partly because I'm not sure that I'll like the end result! Having said that, when I halved the ingredients I was mean with the seeds, using just a scant tsp, mean with the coffee, using just over a half a tsp instant espresso powder (I really don't like coffee at all, even as a flavouring in cakes, but having successfully made Dan's Black Pepper Rye Bread that has coffee as the liquid component, I suspect that the coffee will add to the complexity of flavours rather than overwhelm the loaf), and used about 20g butter.

Cooked rye, muscovado sugar and yeast.

Leaving the yeast to sponge briefly with a portion of the rye that is cooked.

The same mixture after being left for almost an hour.

Lots of random ingredients, ready to be heated.

All in, now to mix...

Mixed up dough, rough and ready before kneading.

Just before shaping. I chose a baton shape rather than the specified round.

After prooving.

Dusted and slashed. I didn't coat mine with the specified sesame seeds, because as I mentioned above, I don't really do seeds.

Just out of the oven.

The crumb is so, so soft. I'm really pleased with the way this has turned out - I chose the right time to bake and was rewarded with oven spring and my slash opening out well, and the crumb is moist and even.

I baked for 10 minutes at Gas 7/220C, then 30 minutes at Gas 6/200C, followed by a further 10 minutes at Gas 6/200C upside down to crisp the base of the loaf.

Amazing looking bread - I haven't had any of it yet, but will update with tasting notes as soon as I can.

Edited 02/04 It's a stunning bread to eat - soft and moist but not pappy soft. The flavour is certainly unusual. The combination of rye, coffee, cocoa and treacle all sort of magically meld into one seamless complex whole - of those flavours I could probably have identified treacle as one but the others were mingled. I'm sure this is just how it is meant to be - after all, the coffee in the Black Pepper Rye bread isn't noticeable as coffee either. I'm glad about this as a non-coffee lover. The next thing I say may sound obvious to many of you, but bear with me, because I've only ever used caraway seeds once before in my life! The choice of seeds in the recipe is caraway, fennel or cumin and I chose caraway, simply because I had them available. The caraway flavour is still very prominent after baking. I thought that this may be the case, because it is a strong flavour, but wondered if it would be tempered by all of the other flavours in the loaf - not so much is the answer! This is fine and great if you love caraway, but I'm still not so sure. I guess this means I'm perching on the fence with this loaf. So it's a stunning loaf - visually, texturally and flavourwise, but use seeds that you know you like the flavour of. Next time I'll make it without seeds I think! I had mine with hard cheese, but think it would actually be much better with a cream cheese.

I'm also entering this into Alphabakes, hosted by Caroline at Caroline Makes and the host this month, Ros at The More than Occasional Baker. The Letter this month is B. So I think my Black Bread qualifies there! 

Mocha cake with coffee buttercream

And now for something more successful.... (and where is October disappearing to so quickly? my time seems to be vanishing into a big black hole at the moment!)

I'm not a big coffee drinker and don't particularly enjoy the flavour. However, I sometimes really fancy a bit of coffee, don't know why, but I do like the smell, especially on holiday! But I feel I ought to try and come round to this 'adult' flavour so occasionally when the craving hits I make something coffee flavoured. Because I don't drink it, I struggle to know how to add coffee flavour - ground coffee directly into the batter? instant coffee made up strong? In the end I chose instant espresso powder, made up fairly strong to add my flavour. I also wanted to add chocolate, and so added a little cocoa powder too, pretty much making it up as I went along!



Mocha cake with coffee buttercream
Ingredients
200g softened butter
200g light muscovado sugar
3 eggs
1 tbsp cocoa powder (this was 9g)
1tsp instant espresso powder made up in a little boiling water, allowed to cool slightly
225g self raising flour


For the buttercream
100g softened butter
225g icing sugar
1 tsp instant espresso powder made up in a little boiling water, allowed to cool slightly
a little dark chocolate to decorate

Method
- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and line an 8x12" (20x30cm) traybake tin with silicon parchment.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well until mixed and adding a little of the flour to prevent the mixture curdling if it threatens to do so.
- Add the cocoa powder and flour and mix to combine. Fold in the coffee.
- Spoon into the prepared tin and level out. Bake for 40-45 minutes until well risen and lightly golden brown.
- Remove to a wire rack and allow to cool.

For the buttercream, beat together the butter and icing sugar until extremely pale and fluffy, adding the coffee a little at a time as you do so.

When the cake is cool, trim the edges and cut in half lengthways so you have two long pieces of equal width. Spread half of the buttercream onto one piece of cake, place the other piece on top and spread with the remaining buttercream. I had such a good time doing this, it felt like bricklaying and it was really hard to just leave the buttercream alone once it looked done, I kept wanting to rearrange it!!! Grate a little dark chocolate over the top of the cake to decorate.

Wait for admiring responses!


I'm not quite sure exactly what it is about using coffee in cooking but I always seem to get a really, really light cake when I do a coffee cake. I can make quite reasonable plain vanilla or chocolate cakes in the same manner, but when coffee is added the resulting cake always seems to be lighter. I've spoken to J about it and she agrees that her coffee cake is always really light in texture. I wonder if anyone else has found this? Let me know in the comments below!

Anyway, what did it taste like? Fab! I'm still not sure if I'm a fan of coffee flavour in cakes and I suppose this cake is only gently coffee flavoured - if you're a coffee lover I think the flavour could definitely be ramped up to please you, but it was still quite nice. As mentioned above, the texture was really light and moist and I felt that the ratio of buttercream to cake was just right - enough to add moisture and richness and interest but not so much that it was sickly or oversweet at all. I couldn't detect any chocolate flavour at all, but wasn't really surprised about this. I guess it might have added depth of flavour to the coffee, along with the muscovado sugar but this is not a chocolate lovers cake!

Black pepper rye bread

Not the best photos I realise, but I couldn't find a better way of getting a picture of this rather delicious loaf. Another recipe from Dan Lepard, and made to wide praise (here on his forums). The combination of coffee and black pepper intruiged me and the picture of the loaf in the Guardian looked so inviting that I just had to make this, despite having a dislike of coffee. After checking with Sue over at Mainly Baking that the coffee flavour wasn't too pronounced when she made the loaf I went ahead.

I checked the forum for any comments and discovered that some people had found the mixture quite dry, so I was careful to take my hot rye mixture off as soon as it boiled. Even so I found the mixture stiff and added some more warm water to it, probably about 50ml in total. It's perhaps just that I'm not as used to working with a dough where you're mixing the additional flour into a cooked paste rather than adding the liquid to the dry ingredients. Other than this, I followed the recipe exactly, the only change being that I omitted the fennel/anise flavour - I'm not sure that I'm keen on these flavours and it was going to be a lot of bread to eat if I wasn't keen on it! I'll try those flavours elsewhere and if I like them, will add them next time.

It's not the most perfect shape in the world, but I quite like the fact that it's individual - after all, I've made it, not bought it! And I'm not going to be sharing any of it either ;-)


I was really pleased with the interior of the loaf - it was very moist in a pleasant way with an even textured crumb and a beautiful colour - not the usual slightly offputting grey of rye, but with a brown hue from the coffee. I couldn't taste the coffee at all, which is perfect for me - I don't actually like coffee and so making this loaf was a bit of a gamble, but one that paid off. The pepper is very noticeable, to the extent that after a few bites you find yourself reaching for a drink to cool the mouth (but this is coming from someone with no heat tolerance at all - I never eat chilli-hot food, even mild level, so if you're a chilli lover I'm sure you'll hardly notice the heat at all!).


Perfect slathered with cream cheese for lunch - and no need to add pepper to the top!

2008 - The best bits

I haven't been blogging for a year yet, but have really enjoyed the time I've spent doing it and have read some really inspiring posts this past year. I'm really looking forward to creating more delicious things for the blog this year, perhaps with some forays into savoury cooking too. Anyway, here are my favourite posts of the past year, seven, randomly enough! Some of them are favourites because the outcome was utterly delicious, some because they represent something I learnt and others because I actually managed to get a decent shot of them. I hope you enjoy them. What were your favourite posts this past year?

These Butter Whirls were the first time I've successfully managed to use a piping bag. Great fun to make and delicious to eat, what's not to like.

Marbled chocolate cake - so simple to make, looks impressive and so easy to eat.

Although I have no idea what these coffee walnut cupcakes with coffee buttercream icing taste like personally, I'm guessing they're delicious from the speed they disappeared at work. These represent the first time I successfully piped buttercream icing to look as luscious and inviting as I wanted it to.

A combination of a fantastic recipe and some luck meant that these chocolate custard muffins were some of the best muffins I've ever tasted. Thanks to Dan Lepard for the recipe! I was really impressed that they turned out just like the photo.

The ginger spice cupcakes with lemon icing that I made in November were possibly the most more-ish cake I made this year. The sweet-sour icing perfectly offset the spicy soft cake underneath to perfect effect. Definitely on the to-make-again-ASAP list!

Both of the last choices come from December. It was a good month for baking. J enjoyed the Stollen I made as part of her Christmas present (thanks are again due to Dan Lepard for his fantastic recipe):

And all of us enjoyed this delicious Rosemary and Rock Salt Foccacia with our mushroom risotto on Boxing Day. (I sound like a record that's got stuck, but it just goes to show that Dan Lepard produces consistently good recipes!)

I hope you all had a great year in 2008 and here's to an even better 2009!

Coffee Walnut cupcakes

Well, I think these are definitely the best I've made yet. I took them into work and they got rave reviews, with one colleague saying they were possibly the best coffee walnut cake she had eaten! Can't ask for better than that really. It's just a shame that I'll never taste them I suppose!!! (Nut allergy and not liking coffee very much.) I try not to work with nuts too often, but I had a packet of walnuts in the cupboard destined for a rich fruit cake that I'd changed my mind about making, so it was a good use to put them to. J has often found when making cakes for Church coffee mornings that the coffee walnut is one of the first to sell out, it just seems to be very popular. It could also be that she bakes a fantastic coffee walnut cake, all of the regular coffee morning attendees know this and it gets snapped up in the blink of an eye. Personally I think it must partly be a nostalgia thing, nothing says hazy summer childhood days better than coffee walnut cake.

I've made this before as a traybake type cake (as J does) and sliced it up before serving, but individual cakes are easier for work and lend themselves to piped buttercream better than a large cake does. However, I noticed that the texture of this cake is extremely light and fluffy, more so than you would expect for a normal sponge cake mixture. I don't really understand why this is, as it's made in the same way so I'm guessing it's something chemical to do with the coffee in the cake mix. Interesting....

So, onto the recipe. Quantities are a little flexible - it depends how much you like coffee and walnuts! I used 50g of chopped walnuts in the mixture, but you could easily increase that, perhaps even double it if you want to. I used a heaped tsp of instant coffee dissolved in about a tbsp of boiling water for the mixture, but again, if you're a coffee fiend and like your coffee mega powerful, you could try a tbsp of coffee in the least amount of water it takes to dissolve it. The buttercream is also a moveable feast - I was making buttercream for two different sets of cakes at the same time, so at a guess I used 100g of butter to 225g icing sugar and a heaped tsp of instant coffee in a tbsp boiling water. If you love buttercream and want all your cakes to look like the ones on the right hand side of the picture above (no cake visible, buttercream right to the edges of the case) I'd say to use 120g butter to 260g icing sugar, plus coffee. Otherwise 100g butter is probably fine. So, the recipe....

Coffee Walnut Cupcakes with Coffee Buttercream Icing

Ingredients

120g butter, softened

60g caster sugar

60g light muscovado (light brown soft) sugar

2 large eggs

120g sifted self raising flour

1tsp instant coffee dissolved in 1tbsp boiling water (or more, see above) - allow to cool

50g chopped walnuts

For the icing

100-120g softened butter

225-260g icing sugar, sifted if very lumpy

1 heaped tsp instant coffee dissolved in 1tbsp boiling water (or more, see above), allowed to cool

12 walnut halves

Method

-Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases.

-Cream butter and sugars together until light and fluffy.

-Add eggs one at a time with a little flour to stop the mixture curdling if you want.

-Add the cooled coffee mixture. It does seem a pain to wait until it cools, but if you don't it's likely to curdle your mixture (as I found to my cost - I actually added mine after the flour, having forgotten to add it before, and it split the mixture a little, but luckily the final cakes were ok!)

-Fold in the flour and chopped walnuts. Divide the mixture between the paper cases and bake for 20-25 minutes until springy when pressed and a cake tester/cocktail stick comes out clean. Remove to a wire rack and allow to cool. (Drool as the smell of coffee and nuts fills your house....)

-For the buttercream, combine the softened butter and icing sugar with a fork, then switch to an electric mixer and carry on beating until the buttercream is very light and fluffy and has turned pale in colour. Add the (cooled) coffee mixture (to taste - see above) and beat to combine.

-Place the nozzle of your choice into a piping bag, fill with the buttercream and pipe away to your hearts content. Swirly buttercream - yum.

-Place a walnut half (try and find 12 nice halves in the packet of walnuts - this is one case where you do need to buy the more expensive halves rather than chopped/broken walnuts) on the top of each little tower of buttercream. You could add some more chopped walnuts on the side of the buttercream, but I prefer the simplicity of just the one half on top.

-Enjoy your creation. (Or in my case, give your creations to someone else and watch them enjoy!!!)

Chopped walnuts ready to be added to the mixture - you can just see the halves I've reserved for topping the cupcakes to the left of the picture.

Strong, strong coffee. Even J doesn't drink it like this! Notice the resemblance to tar!!! You want the instant coffee to only just dissolve in the boiling water.

Naked cupcakes ready to be iced.

An utterly droolworthy iced cupcake - how can you resist?!