Cooking Crusade

It’s a difficult thing to find a Really Good Cookie Recipe. There’s usually one problem – too crispy, not soft enough, too many choc chips or not enough. My ultimate cookie is a soft, dense cookie. Chewiness will also not go amiss. Oh-so-slightly crispy at the edges but gorgeously soft and dense in the centre.
Probably one of the best cookies in the world come from Subway, but I almost never allow myself to buy them since I discovered they were 200 calories a pop (and seriously, who can resist that three cookies for $2.50 deal? come on people, i don’t have that much self control).

These aren’t particularly chewy, but they are certainly dense, soft and crispy. Love, love, love them. I was passed on the recipe from my friend Niwa, can be found here. The original recipe is for white chocolate macadamia cookies, but i’ve made these with regular choc chip with same success – it’s a great basic cookie dough.

Ingredients
2 1/4 C plain flour I once made these cookies without adding baking soda. They were far better with the baking soda – too dense.
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
1 C brown sugar
1/2 C white caster sugar
3/4 C butter, room temperature – (important for creaming)
2 large eggs
2 t vanilla essence/extract
1 cup nuts (pecans or macadamia) – I used macadamias
1 1/2 C white chocolate, chopped - I used 1 cup of white chocolate chips

Preheat your oven (180 C) and line a baking tray with baking paper or a baking mat. In a dry bowl, mix together flour, salt and baking powder.

Cream butter and sugars with an electric mixer or with a wooden spoon and some serious elbow grease. Add eggs and vanilla and beat until light and fluffy.

Add flour, cup by cup at a time. I always use a wooden spoon for this step, otherwise the flour shoots everywhere with the electric mixer. Flour + cookie dough on the walls = not good.

Fold in your chocolate chips and chop nuts.

Add nuts to the dough.

Macadamia nuts are hard to chop.. I find they have a tendency to shoot everywhere if you’re not careful. I tried bashing them in a ziplock bag, but I broke the bag. Haha. If you have a good solution for macadamia-bashing, let me know your tips and tricks!

Tip – leave in the fridge for 30-60 minutes to harden the dough. This makes it easier to shape into round balls and according to some, makes the dough denser when baking. I have no idea what the connection is, though. Feel free to share, if you know!

Shape tablespoons of dough into balls and place on tray. If you checked out my previous post, you may have halved the choc chips.. if you have, use the reserved amount to decorate cookies with. If not, just chuck in the oven and bake away away.

NOW LISTEN UP, BECAUSE THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART.
DO NOT WALK AWAY FROM YOUR OVEN. DO NOT DO IT.

The best way to get good cookies is by WATCHING THEM LIKE A HAWK. Too many times I have walked away from an oven in boredom, only for a few minutes, seriously and I’ve paid the price with sad, sad burnt cookies. It’s just so annoying buying good ingredients, putting it all together only to get screwed up results. Trust me. I’ve been through the heartbreak and I don’t want you, dear reader, to go through the same pain. It happened during PMS one time and I nearly cried.

Okay, getting a bit emotional here.

Back to the recipe.

In a hot oven, these tend to bake for about 10-15 minutes. When in doubt take them out earlier rather than later, because cookies tend to firm up quite a bit outside of the oven. You should take them out when they are only just beginning to brown on the edges. But never take too long because you have no idea how much burning is going on underneath the pretty white surface if your oven isn’t the right temperature. Trust me on this. If you get it right, the results are super delicious.

Cool on a wire tray and eat one warm with a glass of milk. It is pure magic – the combination of melted chocolate, crispy, soft cookie and cool milk. You’ll love this one.

xoxox

- Christine

If you want tips on how to freeze cookie dough, check out my previous post, here.

I have always loved rice pudding. When I was at Mac Uni, it was one of the staple snacks I would grab from the SAM Shop (SAM Meaning Students At Macquarie.. They changed the name while I was still there, but I never bothered to try and remember the new name.. It will always be the SAM Shop to me!)

It would come cold in a plastic container sprinkled with cinnamon on top. Mmm. That probably doesn’t sound appealing but it was always good. I like that rice pudding is awesome hot or cold. It’s handy if I wanna take some of it to work, or whatevs.

I’d never made it before, but the other day, my boyfriend and I got some pretty crappy food poisoning and really didn’t feel like eating at all. I figured that we should try and at least eat something, but neither of us felt particularly bothered to cook or eat out (especially since we had gotten the nasty bug from a nearby thai place), plus we were running low on groceries. Feeling sick also left me feeling particularly non-creative to whip something up, but then I realised…. rice pudding.

It occurred to me that rice pudding consists of basically three ingredients, those being rice, sugar and milk, which we luckily had. Apparently arborio rice (which I usually use for risotto) was a great rice for rice pudding which was excellent news because I always buy a huge packet to make risotto with and almost always have a half packet rotting away in the cupboard (figuratively, not literally, rotten rice – prolly not too useful.. plus dry rice would probably be difficult to rot). I love finding new uses for groceries that lost their usefulness a long time ago.

I basically followed the taste.com recipe for Vanilla Rice Pudding (With Poached Rhubarb) – although I skipped the rhubarb for sliced fresh strawberries.

• 4 cups gluten-free soy milk I used regular whole milk, about two cups? Although I noticed that I had to add maybe another cup during the cooking, that arborio rice certainly soaks up liquid well…
• 1 cup arborio rice I halved the recipe for two, it was a pretty large serving, bigger than a regular dessert serve probably, but it was the only thing we had eaten all day
• 1/4 cup caster sugar I just added 1/4 cup of caster sugar. I also had a ripe banana lying around and decided to be experimental, mashed it and added it to the mix. it was quite sweet, I think next time i’ll definitely lessen the sugar content, even minus the banana
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract I didn’t have any extract on me, but I keep used vanilla bean pods in my caster sugar which helps to add a vanilla flavour anyway.
  
• I added: Sliced fresh strawberries to serve
  

Combine milk, rice, sugar and vanilla in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to the boil. Reduce heat to low. Simmer, stirring every 5 minutes, for 25 minutes or until rice is tender and creamy.

This actually took a lot longer to cook than I thought.. I used my cast iron saucepan and left it over a higher heat than i intended and the bottom started to burn.. So i took it out and put it into a pyrex bowl and microwaved it until it was done – didn’t affect the texture or taste. Next time I’ll keep a better eye on it.. but this time… sick. (That’s what I’m blaming it on, anyway.)

So my consensus? The pudding was lovely and very creamy. I like that it has a lot less sugar than most desserts and next time I’ll definitely reduce the sugar content. You could probably also use lite milk to reduce the fat content and it was great with the strawberries. Definitely try it with the mashed banana, it gives it a great flavour and adds sweetness. If I was making baby food, I would make this with whole milk, no sugar and just mashed bananas. Pretty healthy and tastes great!

This lovely apple cake is great for dessert, or having friends round as a tea cake. It’s also good for picnics or as something to take along to a BBQ. It’s incredibly simple and very delicious.

Usually with this apple cake, you fill your cake tin halfway with your cake mix, then layer your sliced apples in the middle and add in the rest of your cake mix, so the apples bake in the middle of the cake which is quite good, but for this version, I layered the apple slices on top of the cake and drizzled it with a caramel sauce, which resulted in a crispy top with caramel apples.

Ingredients:
100 grams of butter
1 cup of sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups of self raising flour
1 teaspoon of cinnamon (I like to use mixed spice)
1 large granny smith apple

Preheat oven to 170 degrees. Melt butter. Cool (to avoid cooking the eggs), then mix with eggs. Sift flour and add in sugar/spices. Add egg/butter mixture to flour mixture and stir until combined. Cake mixture should be quite thick. Peel, core and slice apple. Line a cake tin and pour in half of your cake mix and smooth, layer apple slices. Add the rest of your cake mix and bake in hot oven for about 40 minutes or until golden brown and top of cake springs back at touch.

Alternatively:
Pour all of cake mixture into cake tin. Layer apple slices on top of cake.

Drizzle over a caramel sauce (1/2 cup of cream, 3 tablespoons of butter and 1/2 cup of brown sugar, heated in a saucepan until thickened) on the apples

Bake until top is golden and crisp (bottom of cake will still be moist.)

Enjoy with friends and a cup of tea! This cake is also lovely, slightly warmed with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream.

xox