I love to cook. It’s a fact. But when i meet someone that loves to cook as much as i do, guess what we do. WE COOK. For days, literally.
And we tend to use each occasion as an excuse to cook. Saturday we made a great dinner for our girlfriends and yesterday we baked.

This year i’ve got an awesome english teacher : he’s fun and wants us to speak as much as possible. So whenever we want we can plan to talk about a topic; and this week Maud and i decided to plan a cookie swap for the english class.

We made :
- perfect chewy chocolate chip cookies (following MY recipe but with some changes - see below)
- melting brownies
- gingerbread snowflakes

Perfect milk chocolate chip cookies
Just a short note: thank you Maud for helping improving my cookie recipe.
Indeed this time the cookies were exactly what i wanted them to be; which means as chewy as mine were, but also *thick*.
They were a pure delight.
Slighty crispy outside and oozing inside. With big chunks of milk chocolate. Yum delicious !

You can find the recipe here, but i’ll give you some good (and new) tips:
- we used 1 1/2 cup caster sugar and 1 1/2 cup light muscovado sugar: increasing the muscovado sugar ratio helps the cookies getting chewier and with a lovely golden colour.
- we replaced the butter by vegetable shortening as we did not have enough butter. I think it might have an influence on the texture but truth to be told i prefer my cookies with a great butter taste. So i think the kind of fat you use don’t have much influence.
- but what’s important is not to add the fat melted as my first recipe stipulated but cold and diced. So what i do now is: first put flour, baking powder, sugars and vanilla seeds in a bowl. Add the butter (cold and diced) and rub it into the flour mixture. Add the eggs. Add the chocolate chips (here we used milk chocolate chip only).
The dough won’t be as smooth as the old one, it’ll be more like a pate sablée [shortcrust pastry]. So you’ll have to form small disks of 1/4 cup worth and 2cm thick.


Melting brownies
We used the recipe from Nigella Lawson’s Feast : snowflaked brownies but leaving out the white chocolate chips.
We ended with delicious plain brownies, perfectly cooked.
Maud prefered to reduce the sugar to 300g, but i think that 350g (as stipulated in the recipe) wouldn’t have been too much. Blame my sweet tooth for that.

Gingerbread cookies
Due to popular request (*Tiphaine*), i’ll write down the recipe we used to make these wonderful gingerbread cookies.
Just remember these are better the day after they are made.

Festive gingerbread
From Delicious(december), page 178
makes 18 (but we made at least 36 - small shapes)

380g plain flour
1 tbsp ground ginger (we used cinnamon instead)
1 tsp mixed spice
125g unsalted butter (we used vegetable shortening - no flavour modifications)
175g dark muscovado sugar
1 medium egg, beaten
4 tbsp maple syrup (we used honey)

Preheat the oven to 190°C.
Sift the flour, ginger and spice into a bowl. Rub the butter and ugar, removing any sugar lumps. Stir in the egg and maple syrup and mix well.
Tip onto a floured surface and roll out to 5mm thick.
Cut out shapes using festive cookie cutters and place on a baking tray lined with baking parchment. Bake 10-12 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool on a rack. Decorate with icing (see the recipe for royal icing here.
Keep on an airtight box until the next day.

Posted by fanny who loves to forget labeling posts