Chocolate chip cookies with a twist

It's good outside so I decided to take my book out in the garden to read it there. I didn't think it would get that hot in the sun, though. I really had to get inside before getting a sunburn. But what to do when you have time off and you can't do what you had in mind? Right: you get creative in the kitchen :)

Creative to do what I wanted to do (baking chocolate chip cookies) without the necessary ingredients (no vanilla extract, no plain chocolate, ...). Substitutions would have to do.

Ingredients for 8 large cookies:
- 105 grams butter
- 120 grams white chocolate with rice crispies
- 50 grams milk chocolate with hazelnuts (like the one from Côte d'Or)
- 60 grams white sugar
- 1 egg
- 160 grams flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

How to:
In a small pot, melt the butter and the white chocolate. Take off the fire once they've combined and add the sugar and the egg. 
Then put the flour and the baking powder in. Mix well.
When your dough is cooled off, you can throw in the hazelnut chocolate you've cut or broken into small pieces. Stir again so that the chunks are all over the dough.
Line a baking tray with some non-stick paper and make 8 large heaps of dough, evenly spread out over the tray.
Put in a 230°C preheated oven and bake for about 10-15 minutes.
The cookies are still gooey when ready. They set and get crispy when cooled off completely.

My parents' found them delicious. My mum really liked the nutty taste. She thinksI used the real nuts ;) My dad didn't say anything but just ate 2 large ones in about five minutes time!

my sister and one of the cookies ...

Chocolate and raisin biscuits

I woke up way too early this morning. No one to talk to and it's too cold to take a walk outside yet. Making biscuits is something easy, relaxing and it spreads the most amazing aroma through the house. So that's a very good way to pass time.


These biscuits are really aromatic because of the light brown sugar. I took the recipe from a book I bought in Oxford, while on excursion in high school about 6 years ago. It's actually a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, but I altered it a bit. As you know, copy-pasting is not exactly proper in copyright terms ;)


Ingredients:
- 110 grams butter
- 100 grams light brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
- 140 grams flour
- dash of salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- handful raisins
- 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
- 2 tablespoons Nestlé powder
- 50 grams dark chocolate, molten 


How to:
Preheat the oven up to 190°C.
Mix the butter and the sugar until they are creamy. Add the whisked egg. Then add the baking powder, flour, salt, vanilla essence. Now, split the dough in two. In the first half you add the raisins. In the second half you add the molten chocolate, cocoa and the Nestlé powder. 
With a little spoon, drop heaps of dough on the baking tray (on non-stick paper). Leave enough space in between because they tend to get larger while baking.
Bake for about 10-15 minutes according to your oven. They are ready when still soft in the middle but light golden on the sides.

Don't they look good?

Smakelijk! 

Tuiles Viennoises by an amateur

Woken up too early for a day like this, no work or school duties to think about. My only tast today is do the groceries and the shops are not open at 7 am. What to do, then? 


I can't keep myself from messing around in the kitchen on moments like this. I took a look in my cooking library and decided to make peanut butter biscuits. 
Problem was that there wasn't any peanut butter in the house. That's so me - not checking at first what's needed and just starting off. 


As I'd already started mixing the butter and sugar, I had to change plans quickly. I was looking in a cooking book of Le Cordon Bleu, the famous international culinary school. Luckily the book mentioned also a recipe of chocolate sprits or tuiles viennoises.

Ingredients for 10-12 sprits:

- 120 grams butter

- 50 grams white sugar

- 1 egg

- 175 grams flour

- vanilla essence

- 100 grams chocolate

How to:

Mix the butter with the sugar. Add the egg and the vanilla essence. When they've been mixed through, you can add the flour. The dough should be really smooth. 

I set off and mixed all the ingredients just like prescribed, that's not hard. 

Then came the next obstacle on my road to baking sprits: sprits need to be squeezed from a pastry bag on the baking tray. That's quite difficult for me, having no parstry bag in the house. But with a plastic bag and scissors, you can do it just fine. I put all of the dough in the bag and cut a small hole in one of the corners. You don't have these fancy shapes like with a professional pastry bag, but yeah ... the taste won't change, right?

I just needed to bake them in a 200°C oven (preheated) for about ten minutes and they were ready. They were slightly golden. The shape was not al all the one I'd intended of course. I blame the plastic bag!

Now, sprits have this chocolate dipped end, but I decided to turn the biscuits around so that their flat side was up, and I covered these with the molten chocolate.

They are not as fancy as the ones you see in the books, but taste matters :)

Bon appétit!