Chocolate Cashew Cookies

Chocolate Cashew Cookies

I was recently contacted and asked if I would like to take part in the Aero Perfect Pairing challenge. With the offer of Niki Segnet's book 'The Flavour Thesaurus - Pairings, recipes and ideas for the creative cook' I was definitely in. The book arrived along with a big bag of Aero's Chocolate Orange bubbles (which I didn't manage to get a picture of) and a bar of Aero mint chocolate. 

I made some chocolate orange cupcakes using Nigella's Storecupboard Chocolate Orange cake recipe (one of my standby recipes) and topped them with some chocolate frosting and the chocolate  orange balls. Unfortunately, making cakes in the morning before work isn't really conducive to having enough time to allow them to cool, so they were still warm when I put the chocolate frosting (which was itself still warm and runny) on them and the chocolate orange bubbles kind of melted. Sorry, no pictures!

I have to confess that I wasn't quite sure which flavour combination to go for - I wanted something I thought would work, but which isn't too widespread and well known. The brief stated that the recipe didn't have to include either Aero or chocolate but being a bit of a chocoholic, I decided that I would include dark chocolate in my recipe. 

A cookie recipe that I'd bookmarked ages and ages ago from the Hungry Hinny sprang to mind as being an interesting one in which to incorporate different flavours. The recipe is for cream cheese cookies and doesn't use egg at all. I increased the amount of flour slightly and hope that the Hungry Hinny doesn't mind me reproducing my attempt at these cookies. Very unusually for me, I made these by hand - only a bowl and spoon required - no need to make washing up and use the stand mixer!

Creamed butter and cream cheese

Chocolate Cashew Cookies
Ingredients
85g cream cheese (I used full fat Philadelphia)
85g butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 tsp vanilla extract
105g light muscovado sugar
150g plain flour
1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2tsp salt
30g cashews, roughly broken/chopped
50g dark chocolate, in small chunks

Method

- Preheat the oven to 160C. Line two baking trays with parchment paper.

- Beat the cream cheese until softened, then add the melted butter and vanilla. Keep beating - it will turn from curdled looking lumpy mess into a beautifully smooth batter (I had serious doubts when I saw the initial mixture but it all turned out fine). 

- Beat in the sugar and then the flour, bicarbonate and salt until a dough forms.

- Fold in the cashews and dark chocolate. 

- At this point I ignored the instructions to leave for 30 minutes to chill and just dolloped small blobs onto the lined baking tray, spread well apart. (For my mixture putting it in the fridge didn't really seem to make much difference - I put the rest of it in the fridge while the first batch of cookies were baking, but actually preferred that first batch slightly - the second batch appeared 'grainy' - no idea why)

- Bake for 15 minutes until very light brown. Allow to sit for around 10 minutes once removed from the oven to make it possible to transfer them to a wire rack (they'll be very soft once they come out of the oven).

I made 22 cookies from the mixture.

Soft cookie dough

Verdict? Actually, personally I wasn't all that keen on this cashew chocolate combo - I couldn't really taste the cashews and think I should have toasted them before adding them which would have enhanced their flavour and made them crunchier - cashews are quite a soft nut really. Otherwise successful and colleagues liked them more than me. The actual cookie dough part was very soft and far more cakey than I was expecting. I'd like to try the recipe again though. I'm wondering about using some golden syrup sugar from Tate and Lyle I bought recently and using dried fruit like cranberries along with the chocolate. An interesting recipe to play with.

And my colleagues finished up all of the Aero chocolate orange balls quite happily!

Cakey cookies

Disclaimer: I received a copy of 'The Flavour Thesaurus' and some Aero products. All views expressed are my own. Thank you Sophie.

Funny Face Jam and Cream Sandwich Biscuits (Cookies)

I often wish that I had stronger willpower when it comes to resisting things I see that I could use to bake with. I'm sure I'd be a lot better off without some of the things I buy, but it'd also be a lot more boring! That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. 

Anyway, I recently saw some biscuit (cookie) cutters in Lakeland and couldn't resist buying them. I  then made the leap from buying them to actually using them (this happens less often than it should!). Having seen Ros of the More than Occasional Baker using them very successfully I decided I would use her simple sugar cookie recipe for my own attempts. You probably wouldn't guess from the content of this blog, but I actually eat more biscuits than cake, it's just that I don't make them very often. I have a tendency to burn biscuits and they just never seem very successful so it was with some trepidation I set out to make these biscuits.

I needn't have worried though, the recipe was easy to use, and along with Ros's tip about chilling the dough they were very successful, thanks Ros!

Bulging slightly!

Vanilla Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

125g butter

125g white caster sugar

1 egg

2tsp vanilla extract

250g plain flour

To fill

50g butter

70g icing sugar

30g white chocolate, melted and cooled

Method

- Preheat the oven to 175C/Gas 4. Line baking trays with parchment paper.

- Cream together the butter and sugar until light.

- Add the egg and vanilla and beat again.

- Add the flour and fold in. Divide the mixture into two flat discs and refrigerate for around 30 minutes.

- Roll out to your desired thickness (a few mm is fine) and cut out your cookies. Place on a parchment lined baking tray.

- Return to the fridge for 10-15 minutes.

- Bake for around 10 minutes, until going light brown. Mine took a few minutes longer, but watch like a hawk because they'll overcook quite suddenly.

- Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

When cold sandwich together with white chocolate buttercream (50g butter, creamed with 70g icing sugar and then 30g cooled melted white chocolate added) and the jam of your choice - I used blackcurrant.

Generously filled

These were great - I'll definitely have to make my own biscuits more often. They were a lot easier than I was expecting and the dough was really easy to work with too. It was easier when still chilled though, and when it warmed up and started to soften it became more difficult to work with. 

They went really well at work - the crisp biscuit worked well with the soft, sweet buttercream and the slightly sharp jam. In essence, very posh jammy dodgers! Some of my colleagues were greatly amused to find that when bitten into jam oozed out of the eyes of the biscuits - what can I say, I have colleagues with a slightly twisted sense of humour.... (They were right though, the eyes do tend to bulge a bit!)

I'm entering these into Teatime Treats, the theme this month being biscuits/cookies hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage, cohosted by Kate of What Kate Baked.

I'm also entering them into Jac's Bookmarked Recipes - I was pleased to have made these quite quickly after bookmarking them and even more pleased that I got round to using my shiny new biscuit (cookie) cutters!

Ginger Chocolate Chewy Cookies

Also known as third time lucky! And also phew-just-in-time! When Choclette published a recipe for chewy apricot cookies back in December I immediately decided I needed to bake them. They looked delicious and pretty much my idea of a perfect cookie. And then I pretty much went off the idea of baking altogether. (Yep, it's been a bit like that round here recently).

But when I decided that I needed cookies I remembered Choclette's recipe and how good it had looked and decided to make some. Please don't ask what happened to the first batch, and then whilst making the second batch I completely forgot to add the baking powder. So although they turned out ok, they were rather more chewy than I was expecting and I decided that third time's the charm and had another go. I halved the recipe and these went perfectly well.

I'm going to give the recipe here as this is how I made them after adapting the recipe slightly. You can find Choclette's original recipe here.

Ginger Chocolate Chewy Cookies
Ingredients
50g butter, softened
50g light muscovado sugar
15g honey (I used a floral New Zealand honey.... airmiles *cough*)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
75g plain flour
scant 1/2 tsp baking powder
30g crystallised stem ginger, chopped
30g 70% cocoa solids chocolate, chopped

Method

- Preheat the oven to 175C/Gas4 (ish). Line a baking tray with parchment paper.

- Cream the butter, sugar and honey together until well combined.

- Add the vanilla extract, flour and baking powder and continue to mix. The mixture will seem very dry.

- Add the chopped ginger and chocolate and work the mixture together. I used the back of a spatula for this and then ended up squashing it together with my hands.

- Divide into approximately equal balls, I got twelve from my mixture.

- Squash the balls slightly, place well apart (although I only used one tray here and they didn't merge) and bake for 10-15 minutes. I found mine took 16 minutes.

I can see these becoming a favourite around here - they were really quick to put together and to bake and are deliciously soft and chewy. The ginger and chocolate work really well together and the honey is delicious too although the fairly mild honey I used doesn't come through strongly. As they don't have an egg in them it's really easy to halve the recipe too - always a bonus.

I am entering these into this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, hosted by Jen of Blue Kitchen Bakes and co-hosted by Choclette of Choc Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot. The theme this month is ginger and I absolutely adore chocolate, ginger and the combination of the two!

I'm also entering them into Jac's bookmarked recipes challenge as I had noted the recipe on Choclette's blog ages ago and have finally got round to making them.

White Chocolate Chocolate Cookies

These are the result of me picking up the Waitrose recipe cards instore on a recent shopping trip. Yes, I could do my shopping online, but then I'd miss out on this kind of thing. Some might say this would be good for both my bank balance and waistline and I'd be inclined to agree on both counts, but then my life is more fun with cookies in it than without, so I'm prepared to make sacrifices...

This recipe was originally for Chocolate and Macadamia Cookies and is in association with Green and Black's. You can find the original recipe here, but as I can't have macadamia nuts I have adapted it slightly by adding more chocolate.

White Chocolate Chocolate Cookies
Ingredients
115g butter, softened
60g icing sugar
100g plain flour
20g Green and Black's Cocoa powder
1/2tsp vanilla extract
100g white chocolate, chopped (I didn't use G&B here)

Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until pale. Add the flour and cocoa powder to the butter mixture and beat in with the vanilla extract.
- Stir in the chopped white chocolate.
- Roll the mixture into 16 walnut sized balls and place on two parchment lined baking sheets.
- Bake for about 12 minutes (the recipe specifies 15 but mine were overdone by then) but check at 10.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack, or devour whilst still warm and full of melty chocolate.

Tips: 

* Definitely don't leave them for 15 minutes. My first tray were definitely overdone and bordering on bitter and burnt which is such a pity (I ate them anyway...). The second batch, left in for less time, and with the door opened a couple of times to check on progress were much better.

* Green and Black's Cocoa is the way to go here - it's so much darker in colour than (for example) Cadbury's that although I have never actually dipped my finger into both of them to do a taste test comparison, I'm sure that the G&B has a better depth of flavour for this kind of recipe.

Slightly crumbly round the edges and softer and chewier in the middle I did enjoy these. They aren't a 'Millie's Cookie'/American Cookie style with a very chewy centre (I guess because this recipe is eggless) but they are delicious all the same and very quick and easy to make, bake and importantly, eat!

If you visit the Waitrose website you can find more than 5000 recipes - I think I am required to say this in order to be able to publish their recipe, but actually it's entirely not a problem because I really would recommend their website anyway - full of delicious recipes.

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.

Spelt Ginger Cookies and Rye and Raisin Cookies

This weeks Short and Tweet challenge (#shortandtweet) organised by @EvidenceMatters (blog here) was either Spelt Ginger Cookies (page 245) or Rye and Raisin Cookies (page 247). Or both, if you're greedy and fancy both recipes like me!

I had seen the rye and raisin cookies before, but for some reason they hadn't really appealed to me. However, this time round the recipe looked like just the ticket. I think that the use of an egg white had put me off in the past - I'm not very good at using up the components of eggs separately - I don't go for recipes where they need to be separated (having had a few failures with cakes needing whisked egg whites in the past) and hence have no repertoire of recipes to use up excesses of either yolks or whites. Happily though (and I presume deliberately) the recipes chosen complimented each other perfectly - the spelt ginger cookies requiring the yolk! Very satisfying.

Both of these recipes came together very quickly and easily - I baked them on Sunday morning and was done well before lunch, including the need to bake trays of cookies separately - I think I had about six trays worth of cookies! The spelt ginger ones especially so as they didn't require softened butter or any creaming in the technique. I have to confess that I did actually weigh out the dough into the specified size, so I got almost exactly the number of biscuits given in the recipe. I found that they took seven minutes to bake and achieve the required slightly golden colour.

For the rye and raisin cookies I wanted smaller cookies than specified, I made some with 35g of mixture and some with 25g of mixture, spacing them fairly far apart for the first batch. I didn't have any problems with these running together. I then realised that I had forgotten the bicarbonate of soda specified in the recipe and added it to the remainder of the mixed dough. I don't know whether it was for this reason, or perhaps just that the mixed dough was waiting around for a while, but the next couple of batches seemed to spread quite a bit more - with the result that the second tray had quite a few cookies making friends with each other. I preferred them less spread out, so if this was the effect of adding the bicarb, I'd give it a miss next time - I shall have to peruse other people's blogs to find if their cookies also spread out or not! I also found that inspite of making my rye and raisin cookies smaller than the specified size, they took longer to cook. Hmm, don't know why! I baked mine for about 20 minutes - at the specified 12-15 mins they looked very soft indeed.

I was prepared not to like the rye and raisin cookies. I don't really know why. Perhaps it's the slight nubbliness of the rye flour (which didn't really come through in these cookies), or my sort-of-indifference to raisins in some situations. Dan notes that if you don't have a very sweet tooth you can reduce the sugar slightly. I reduced the quantities of both types of sugar by about 15g and thought the cookies were still lovely and sweet. Well, I was pleasantly surprised because these were delicious. The rye, raisin and chocolate blended really well flavourwise, and the texture of slightly crispy and sugary and then chewy raisin was great.

I hadn't seen the recipe for the spelt ginger cookies before (I don't think it's a recipe from Dan's Guardian column) but a little googling will find it without too much trouble. I have to say that of the two recipes, this is the one that really, really appealed to me. And I wasn't let down. I love ginger flavoured cakes and biscuits and these were really good. I had a couple almost straight out of the oven and they were utterly delicious - slightly crispy edges and a great chewy centre, gently spiced with ginger and lovely little nubbles of stem ginger to add a bit of bite. My only regret was that after only a couple of days they had softened significantly and were just chewy without the delicious contrast of crispness round the edge that I had so enjoyed the first day. I wonder if they could be re-crisped in the oven? It seems a shame because the recipe makes quite a large batch and it would be nice to keep them for a week or so. Aside from this they were superb.

The use of wholemeal flour (rye or spelt) in these biscuits doesn't make them health food by any stretch of the imagination, but the knowledge that you are taking on a little more fibre than might be expected from a sweet treat does no harm, and without being told that these recipes were made with wholemeal flour you certainly wouldn't have guessed. I fear that I am beginning to sound like a scratched record, but both of these recipes were excellent and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them (oh, and recommend buying the book too!).

Thanks to EvidenceMatters for excellent choices for this week, which again, I probably wouldn't have made on my own.

Blueberry and Cranberry Condensed Milk Oat Cookies

These cookies are the third in my mini series of things to make with a can of condensed milk. (The first two are these double chocolate blueberry cookies and this brown sugar chocolate cake.) I was looking on the Carnation website, browsing through all of the things I could make with my can of condensed milk (and there are a lot! it's a pretty good website for ideas) and came across this cookie recipe. Although it was the double chocolate cookies in the Sainsburys magazine that first caught my eye, I wasn't particularly happy with the way I baked them (waiting for a re-bake I feel) so a different cookie recipe was just what I wanted. These have a much higher proportion of condensed milk to the other recipe and I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

I decided to halve the recipe, because I had other plans for the remaining portion of condensed milk left in the tin (recipe to follow soon!) and the ingredients I used are listed below. I also decided that having enjoyed the dried blueberries in the last batch of cookies I'd use those again, with the addition of dried cranberries (which are cheaper than dried blueberries, but almost as nice!). The recipe says it makes 12, but they must be 12 absolutely enormous cookies because after halving the recipe I still got about 15 or so!!! In fact, if you're planning to get only 12 out of the full amount, I'd suggest cooking only 4 to each tray because they do spread quite a bit.

110g (4oz) butter, softened
110g (4oz) caster sugar
85g Carnation Condensed Milk
100g (3.5oz) oats
75g (3oz) self raising flour
40g each dried cranberries and dried blueberries

For the method, see the original recipe here. The dough is very sticky, and it wasn't really possible to roll the cookies, it was more a case of mushing them into a cookie-appropriate shape and trying not to lose this shape whilst transfering them onto the baking tray. Mmmm, sticky!!!

As you can see, my cookies don't really look like those on the website. Mine have spread quite a bit more, and I can only think that the amount of flour is slightly different or something like that, because I followed their ingredients and method pretty closely. Anyway, it didn't really matter because these were yummy! They were fairly crisp on the edges and nicely chewy in the middle - a combination of the condensed milk and the chewy oats. I still like dried blueberries and cranberries, which is pretty much what I expected! Very more-ish indeed and definitely one to remember for a fairly small amount of condensed milk.

Double chocolate blueberry cookies

Sorry about the lack of activity round here. I've got lots and lots to post but have been unexpectedly without internet access for the past few days - I was staying in a hotel that I'd expected to have wi-fi and had been planning to catch up on some posting, but there was no wi-fi, so obviously no posting! Never mind, I'll try and make up for it now. Starting with 101 uses of a tin of condensed milk. Well, perhaps not quite. When I made these caramel muffins I not only found Carnation Caramel, but tins of condensed milk too, my cupboards truly are a voyage of discovery sometimes!

A recipe in the current issue of the Sainsbury's magazine (June 2011) had caught my eye, and required 2 tbsp of condensed milk. Obviously it's not ideal to open a can for just 2tbsp (unless you want to risk eating the rest just as it is....) so this post is the first of a mini series using condensed milk. Onto the recipe...

Double chocolate cookies
Ingredients
125g butter, softened
125g caster sugar
2 tbsp condensed milk
125g self raising flour, sifted
50g cocoa powder, sifted *
100g plain/white chocolate, cut into chunks or 50g each dark chocolate and dried blueberries

* I think I used slightly less cocoa, because 50g is an awful lot, and then just added a little more flour to substitute. I think I used about 30g cocoa powder.

Method
- Preheat the oven to 150C/gas 2. Line a couple of baking trays with parchment paper.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
- Beat in the condensed milk and then add the flour and cocoa and mix. Stir in the chocolate and blueberries.
- Roll into 12 walnut sized pieces (I got about 25) spacing well apart on the baking tray. Flatten slightly then bake for about 25 minutes** (I did 20 and they were overdone) until firm at the edges but soft in the middle.
- Leave to cool for a few minutes before transfering to a wire rack to cool completely.

**Gas 2 seemed very cool, so I used gas 3 and baked for 20 minutes. I forgot that because the recipe was only supposed to make 12, so mine were effectively half the size, that they'd need less time anyway. They weren't burnt, but they were definitely overdone - lovely cookies, but too crispy. 

Originally from Sainsbury's magazine, June 2011.

These were nice cookies, but as I say, I definitely overcooked them, and they deserve another chance. I do like the combo of dried blueberries and chocolate. I used quite big chunks of chocolate rather than choc chips, and it was nice to hit a big lump of chocolate; I bet they'd be great warm, or dipped in coffee! They aren't as good as the world peace cookies though! Other flavour variations suggested in the recipe are: White chocolate and cranberry, Zingy ginger and lemon, Maple syrup pecan, Oats and honey, Cherry and flaked almond and Toffee fudge chunk. I quite fancy trying them with maple syrup and cranberry, in a combination of the flavours they suggest!

World Peace Cookies

Thank you Celia. Well, I think that's pretty much the most important thing I could say about these fabulous cookies - if it weren't for Celia over at Fig Jam and Lime Cordial I would never have made these. I guess I ought to thank Dorie Greenspan too, from whom the recipe originates. Thanks Dorie! I think I vaguely remember her posting about them the first time round, but then when she revisited them recently they somehow seemed to leap out of the computer screen at me. I know food can't really do that, but these might as well have done, and I'm glad!

Chocolate cookies piled up before baking

I decided to follow the recipe exactly as Celia has given it, but instead of making all the cookies chocolate, I went with half of them being chocolate and half being dried cranberry. Although actually, now I think about it, it probably would have been nice to have both cranberries and chocolate chunks in the same cookie. Mmmmm, cranberry and chocolate!

 

Cranberry cookies waiting to be baked. I love the way the ruby red of the cranberry glistens in the dark cookie dough! All in I think I got about 30 odd cookies. I wish I'd doubled the recipe. For the chocolate ones I massacred a Lindt chocolate bunny and broke it up into fairly chunky pieces. As Celia points out this makes the cookies harder to slice, but they didn't break up too much, and it's worth it to be able to use delicious chocolate rather than supermarket chocolate chips. The cranberry roll was much easier to slice.

They don't spread too much when baked, so you could probably put them closer together than I did if you wanted. As Celia says, they are very delicate and crumbly. They made it into work intact, but only just, pack them carefully. This is possibly the only disadvantage of these gorgeous cookies - they're rich and chocolatey and actually, the crumbly texture makes them delicious and melting to eat. As one of my colleagues said, they're very more-ish. Difficult to eat just the one, two, three.... You won't regret making them!

Banana, caramel and date cookies

I'm afraid that this is another case of the finished product looking rather less than it tastes. These small, round brown blobs looking distinctly unfestive are probably one of the best things I've made this year, which is pretty high praise given the amount of baking that I've done over the past few months! I can't put my finger on what makes them so tasty, but I will share the recipe so that you can share my joy at the taste of these biscuits. I would wholeheartedly recommend you make them for loved ones, or just for yourself this Christmas time as a real treat. You won't regret it!

The recipe for these lovely cookies comes from a recently acquired book 'Biscuits & Macaroons' published by ACP publications and bought from Marks & Spencer. It contains so many delicious looking biscuit and slice recipes that I am having trouble deciding which ones to try first. What decided it for this recipe was the presence of a manky ripe banana and some dates left over from the I should Cocoa challenge a while back. I'm so glad I had these ingredients to hand because this recipe is a keeper. I have altered it slightly from publication, and will give my instructions for making them too.

Banana, date and caramel cookies

Ingredients

125g soft butter

220g light muscovado sugar

1 medium banana, very ripe (about 140g with skin)

300g plain flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

75g finely chopped dried dates (I snipped mine with scissors)

18-20 chewy toffees (I used Werther's chewy toffees - a 135g packet gave just enough with one left over as cook's perk!)

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4. Line two large baking sheets with silicon parchment paper.

- Cream the butter and sugar until combined and light. Add the banana, mashing it against the side of the bowl and then mix it in.

- Mix in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and then when combined, the dates.

- Chop the toffees in half (I did this with scissors again). Form balls of the mixture (about walnut sized) and push half a toffee into the centre of each, moulding the ball closed with your fingers.

- Place on prepared trays and then bake for 20-25 minutes. I baked for 25 minutes, but wished that I'd taken them out after 20 because the edges were a little too crisp. They did soften after a couple of days though, which was delicious!

- Allow to cool a little on the trays - this is important because otherwise the toffee sticks to the paper, pulling the cookies apart when you try to lift them (....speaks the voice of experience!) then allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

Yeah, try and contain the piece of caramel in the middle of the biscuit dough when shaping. I clearly didn't manage it and some tried to escape..... still delicious though! The edges of the cookie were slightly crisp, but softened after a couple of days. They were lovely and sweet but with the caramelly and slightly complex edge that the muscovado sugar and dates give, and deliciously chewy in the middle from the toffee. I would like to try them again, perhaps pushing a piece of bitter chocolate into the centre with the toffee to add a different flavour note to them. I seem to have found another way to enjoy dates, the dried fruit of which I never think that I'm very fond, and equally good, a way of using up just one overripe banana.

My colleagues loved these, and quite a few people commented on how good they were, a sentiment with which I can only agree.