So, rain delayed play in the Federer v Murray final this afternoon. And I decided it was probably a good time to make some scones, so there would be scones and strawberry jam with a nice cup of Earl Grey tea to help us get through to the end of the game.
Apologies that this is partially metric and partially old school. But it’s just how it is.
Sweet scones
300g plain flour
1 heaped tsp baking powder
2oz cold butter
1 egg
130ml milk
another egg and a slurp of milk to make an eggwash
a couple of TBsps granulated sugar
Preheat oven to Gas Mark 9, or as hot as you can get in whatever oven you own
Sift the flour and baking powder together in a nice big wide bowl
Cut the cold butter into it, in wee chunks
Using your fingertips, rub the butter into the flour till it resembles sand. As you rub in the butter lift the mixture up high, and let it fall through your fingers, getting lots of air into the mixture
Now make a well in the centre of the mixture
In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg and the milk, then pour the combined mixture into the well
Now you’re going to get your hands dirty. Make your fingers ‘stiff’ so your hand is like a wee shovel and use your hand to quickly mix all the ingredients together
Once they are all combined stop mixing and go and wash and dry your hands
Sprinkle flour on a board, and tip out the scone dough
With your hands bring the dough together into a neat round, about 1.5″ thick
Use a cutter to cut into rounds and set aside
Whisk together the egg and milk for the egg wash and put the sugar in a bowl
Brush the eggwash on each scone and then dip their tops into the sugar to give them a scrunchy sugary top
Place spaced a wee bit apart on a baking sheet
Bake for 10 – 12 minutes
Eat warm with butter and homemade strawberry jam. Or that tasty gooseberry and elderflower jam I made last weekend… Or clotted cream and blackcurrant jelly. Or rhubarb compote with whisked cream. Or perhaps some lemon curd and a mini scoop of vanilla icecream.
And if you don’t eat them all straight way then pop them in the freezer. They’ll only need about 20 – 40seconds in the microwave to defrost and reheat them. Delumptious.
This cake isn’t especially shiny, but it is possibly the most delicious cake I’ve ever made. It also can pretend to be healthier than some cakes, as it is chock full of pineapple and banana. So, I think that means I can call it shiny cake if that is what I want to call it, or just because an old girlfriend could never remember that its real name was Cookie Shine Cake, and it was always referred to as the Shiny Cake.
A cookie shine is what Scots used to call a tea party. I’m a Scot and don’t recall ever hearing of a cookie shine, but Sue Lawrence tells me it is so, so it must be true. She does mention that it was mostly used in the 19th century and that it is now pretty much obsolete, so perhaps I’m forgiven for never having used it; I’m not THAT old.
The cake is moist and sweet, like a luxurious, tropical carrot cake, covered in luscious creamy cream cheese icing. Go on, it’s simple to make, uses up that desiccated coconut and the tin of smushed pineapple you have in the cupboard. Oh? Is it only me who has a random tin of crushed pineapple in the back of the cupboard?
This recipe comes from Sue Lawrence’s Scottish Kitchen. She’s a great cookery writer providing foolproof baking recipes for all manner of classic scottish homebaked goods, such as shortbread, bannocks and scotch pancakes. But there is so much more to her books than classic scottish high tea fare – not only does she provide a bit of social history around her recipes, and her travels around Scotland, but she also has great go-to recipes for almost every occasion, from quick weekday suppers to outdoor eating (yes, in Scotland!) and smart dinners. Go on, buy one of her books and see what I mean.
Anyway, here we go:
Shiny Cake
250g / 9oz SR flour
275g / 9.5oz light muscovado sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnnamon
a pinch of salt
2 large eggs, beaten
225ml / 8 fl oz sunflower or rapeseed oil
1 432g can of crushed pineapple, in natural juice, drained
2 small ripe bananas, peeled and squished
50g / 1.75oz desiccated coconut
75g / 2.75oz chopped roasted hazelnuts
Icing
100g / 3.75oz butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
200g / 7oz cream cheese (full or low fat, you decide)
300g / 10.5oz golden icing sugar
1 TBsp chopped roasted hazelnuts
Prepare two 8″ cake tins (or one deep loose-bottomed tin) and preheat the oven to 280C / 350F / GM4
Mix flour, sugar, cinnamon and salt together in a big bowl
Add the eggs and the oil
Add the pineapple, bananas, coconut and hazelnuts and mix well together
Spoon the mixture into the cake tin/s and bake for 35 – 40 minutes. You’ll need slightly longer if you are using one cake tin, so do check it’s ready by inserting a skewer into the centre of the cake and if it comes out clean, it’s ready. If not, give it another few minutes and test again.But remember if you are opening and shutting the oven door on your cake, do it gently – you don’t want to blast in any cold air into the oven, or the cake will flop.
Leave to rest in the tin for about 30minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.
While it’s cooling you can get on with the icing.
Cream together the butter, vanilla extract and cream cheese, using an electric beater, till smooth.
Start adding the icing sugar a little at a time and keep beating till all the icing sugar is added and the icing is smooth and luscious.
If you had one cake, split it in two. Sandwich the two halves together with icing and then cover the top with icing too. Sprinkle toasted hazelnuts round the outside edge of the top, or all over. Or not at all.
Now, get yourself a nice cake plate and serve your cake, preferably with a pot of Earl Grey tea and proper porcelain tea cups.
I have to say that Sue Lawrence is very particular about her half ounce measurements – I am not. I still prefer to cook in ounces and pounds. I know what 4oz of butter looks and feels like; I can measure out an ounce of flour just using spoons and hardly need to use the weighing scales. This recipe, I’m pleased to report, seems to be fairly forgiving – so if you want to round up or down with your ounces please do so. But don’t blame me (or Sue Lawrence!) if it doesn’t quite work.
Not really, it’s cat’s tongues. Or Langues de Chat biscuits. But I’ll come to them in a minute.
We had some friends over for supper yesterday. We were going to barbecue, which is lovely and simple and just involves prepping a variety of things and then bringing it all together in a communal cook-a-thon on our most excellent portable barbecue (an upcycled old wheelbarrow).
But it’s Scotland in mid-June so the skies opened and it didn’t stop raining all day long. Add that to a cold wind and it was clearly no evening for a barbecue.
Plan B was homemade burgers. So we had a totally retro meal with prawn cocktail to start (with bought-in iceberg lettuce, because when I went to pick lettuce from the garden I discovered the rabbit had been there before me. Grrrr), and strawberry ripple ice-cream for afters, with langues de chat biscuits.
I could get seriously addicted to these biscuits, so it’s just as well that they are ridiculously easy to make. As far as a biscuit goes, I think these deliver the max on Ease of Making vs Tasty Loveliness. And if you’re careful you can make them look utterly professional in a uniform sort of a way.
Langues de Chat
Preheat oven to 200C / GM6. Lining a baking sheet (or two) with greaseproof paper. Find your piping bag, and fit it with a plain nozzle.
100g icing sugar, sifted
100g softened, unsalted butter
1tsp vanilla extract
2 large egg whites
120g plain flour, sifted
Beat together the icing sugar and butter, till it is soft and fluffy
Add the vanilla and then the egg whites, one at a time, beating well after each addition
Fold in the plain flour
Dollop it all into your piping bag (you know that the easiest way to do this is to put the whole bag into a tall container, folding the bag over the edges, a bit like how you’d line a bin with a bin liner)
Squeeze the mixture onto your baking sheets (if you’re a true professional, you might have drawn lines on your paper, so all the biscuits are the same length. I’m not).. you are probably looking for 2″ long squeezes. They expand a bit on cooking so leave enough room for them to spread out.
Bake for about 8 minutes, until the biscuits are lightly golden and going nicely brown at the edges.
Leave for a minute or two on the baking sheet and then transfer to a wire rack to cool.
These are perfect with ice cream. Or a cup of coffee. Or a bowl of strawberries. Or made into sandwiches with jam, or lemon curd, or chocolate ganache (but do this just before you serve them as they’ll go soft after a wee while).
As an aside, the ice cream I made didn’t work. It turns out that if you don’t put enough sweet stuff in with the cream it stays too hard and feels like solid cream with ice crystals in it. Bah. And in the past I’ve made such nommy ice cream. Never mind. The biscuits were great. So was the company.
Note to self These biscuits only help weight loss if you don’t eat them, or any of the raw mixture. Or perhaps if you limit yourself to only one or two. And I mean only one or two in total, not just one or two at a time. They are seriously more-ish! But seriously, they come out as such teeny wee light wee biscuits that they might be good for some people on a diet – one or two biscuits might give you enough of a wee sugary hit, without breaking the calorie bank.
It was bound to happen one day. I have a bottle of Caorunn Gin on the counter in my kitchen. And it was inevitable that one day while I was baking, the urge would become too great and I would end up with gin and tonic flavoured baked goods.
Yesterday was that day. But first of all let me tell you a wee bit about Caorunn Gin. It’s Scottish, and it’s delicious. That’s almost all you need to know, but not quite. It’s a small batch gin, and infused with the most deliciously delicate array of botanicals: rowanberry, heather, bog myrtle, dandelion and coul blush apple. And you drink it with a slice of apple, not lime or cucumber or even lemon. And preferably Fentiman’s tonic. It’s my gin of choice these days, although I’m sure I could be persuaded to drink almost any other brand if necessary.
But back to the baking. I’d decided on muffins. And then I had narrowed it down to lemon muffins. With poppy seeds. Well, I thought I’d narrowed it down to that, but clearly I hadn’t… my baking muse was still playing with me. As I grated the lemon zest into the mix it dawned on me that gin and tonic was what these wee muffins really needed (I had already decided they were going to be mini muffins).
And so the gin and tonic muffin was born. I really do fear that this could start a whole load of crazy cocktail themed baking. Ah well…
Gin and Tonic Muffins
Prepare muffin tins (I used teeny weeny ones, and regular ones, and this batter made 24 wee ones plus 6 regular) and preheat oven to 375-400F / 190-200C / Gas 5-6
9oz plain flour
3 tsp baking powder
a pinch of Maldon sea salt
3oz caster sugar
2-3 TBsp poppy seeds
1 egg
1tsp grated lemon zest
3 fl oz sunflower oil
4 fl oz cloudy apple juice
4 fl oz gin and tonic (mostly tonic, but a good slug of gin)
Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a large bowl.
Stir in the poppy seeds
In a separate bowl, beat the egg
Add in the lemon zest, oil, apple juice and gin and tonic, and beat together
Pour the wet mix into the dry stuff and mix all together – you don’t want to beat it, but just bring it together, making sure there are no pockets of flour
Spoon into tins and bake for 20 – 25 mins (slightly less for the mini ones)
These would work well with a wee cream cheese icing (with some gin and tonic in it) or with an icing glaze, made with icing sugar and apple juice and a hint of gin. They seemed to rise more than usual almost like a souffle which I think must be down to the fizzy tonic.
And if you’re not using Caorunn, you might want to use a different fruit juice, such as orange or perhaps grapefruit. Mind you, the grapefruit might do weird things to the raising agent? I’ve not tried it, so don’t blame me if it goes wrong!
You might want to look at some of my other recipes, there’s lots of homebaking, and a bit of preserving, and various main courses. Anyway, have a browse here and if you have any questions, just get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.
Yes, I know apples aren’t a very springtime fruit, but I don’t seem to have anything local and seasonal in the fruit department yet. No rhubarb, no Scottish berries, not even a British apple to be had in my local supermarket today. Yes, I know, I should have shopped at the farmers’ market – but I needed to do one of those monster shops, with all sorts of store cupboard and cleaning staples, so the supermarket got my custom today.
It’s a glorious sunny day today here in the Clyde valley. Glorious and sunny in that peculiarly Scottish way of also being what you might call ‘a bit fresh’. I call it chilly. So I pootled about for a few minutes in the garden, just to check that everything was doing as it should, then watered everything in the deliciously warm greenhouse, and then decided it was time to bake a cake.
I’d thought of a hazelnut sort of a cake, but had no hazelnuts in the cupboard so that wasn’t going to happen. Then I’d thought of something with some lemon for springtime zestiness, some ground almonds for moistness, and perhaps an apple or two just for fun.
So, here we have it Springtime Apple Cake
Preheat your oven to 160C / Gas 4
Grease a 23cm deep cake tin
3 apples – I used braeburns, and it will need something with a bit of crunch to it, and a slight sharpness. Cooking apples would be fine too
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
225g golden caster sugar
225g softened butter
3 medium eggs
200g SR flour
50g ground almonds
2 tsp baking powder
Peel and dice the apples, into wee chunks, about 1cm max. Drop them in a bowl with the lemon juice and stir them up a wee bit to coat them all in juice – this will stop them going brown while you do the rest of the cake making. It’ll give a nice zesty flavour too
Beat the butter, sugar and lemon zest together till you get a good light fluff of a mixture
Add the eggs one at a time. Add a wee bit of flour after each egg if the mixture is showing signs of splitting
Fold in the sifted dry ingredients
Stir in the apple chunks
Dollop the mixture into the cake tin, and level the mixture.
Cook for about an hour. If it smells too burny burny, then put it onto a lower shelf, or cover it with greaseproof paper to stop the top burning.
To test if it’s ready, insert a skewer into the middle of the cake and pull it out again. If it’s covered in soft cake batter it’s not ready, if it’s clean it’s ready. Yay!
Cool in the tin for about 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.
Dredge with caster sugar, and serve warm with creme fraiche. Or on its own.
You may be interested to know that if you are counting weightwatcher points (as I am currently) then if you slice this cake into 10 pieces (which I think is easily do-able) each slice has 9 points. That’s without your dollop of creme fraiche. An apple with no cake wrapped round it would be 0 points. But where would the fun be in that?
Muffins are one of the easiest things to bake. Once you have a recipe, it is easily adaptable – just make sure you have roughly the same proportion of dry goods to liquid and you’ll be fine.
I don’t always manage to get my 5-a-day of fruit and veg and I know I’m not alone. So, these muffins will help you on your way. OK, they might not get you that far along the way, but they are healthier than chocolate muffin.
Tropical muffins
9oz plain flour
1oz porridge oats
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
1 egg
4oz soft brown sugar
3fl oz vegetable oil
6fl oz milk
8fl oz tinned crushed pineapple (without too much of the juice)
2fl oz pineapple juice (some of that juice squeezed from the pineapple in the tin)
In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda and salt. Stir in the porridge oats. This will be the bowl everything ends up in, so make sure it’s big enough
In another bowl beat the egg and stir in the sugar, oil, milk, pineapple and juice
If the creamed coconut is solid, warm it up to loosen it enough to pour, and add to the eggy mix bowl
Pour all of the wet mixture into the dry and stir lightly just to combine. You don’t want any dry flour left in the mixture, but really it hardly needs stirring at all or the muffins will end up more solid than you’d like.
Fill muffin cups about 3/4 full.
Sprinkle generously with desiccated coconut.
Bake for about 20 minutes or until tops are lightly browned and spring back gently
I suspect you could substitute some of the milk in this recipe for malibu to make a proper grown up cocktail muffin. I think I may have to do a series of cocktail home-baked goods.
Baking for colleagues is incredibly rewarding. Baking for colleagues and asking them to make a donation to charity is even more rewarding. And when the charity is the organisation we all work for, it feels like some kind of virtuous (although slightly insane) circle.
I wanted to make a chocolatey almondy cake… and when I came across a chocolatey, orangey almondy cake recipe I knew it was The One. I’d never tried a recipe where you boil the orange in water for half an hour and then smoosh it up in a food processor (or liquidiser in my case) and add the whole thing to the cake mixture. But I have now! And so can you, it makes for a deliciously moist and tasty cake.
The other brilliant thing about this recipe is that it is ridiculously simple – it doesn’t need any elbow grease, beating butter and sugar till fluffy. In fact it is like a carrot cake recipe in that it uses oil instead of butter. Try it and see – but make sure you have lots of friends who want to eat it, it’s a big beast of a cake!
Chocolate truffle icing on the orange almond chocolate cake
Orange almond and chocolate cake
Pre-heat oven to 180C / GM4
Prepare a 24cm deep (or springform) tin
2 oranges
150g dark chocolate
5 eggs
400g vanilla caster sugar
350g sunflower oil
125g ground almonds
25g cocoa powder
375g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3-4 TBsp grand marnier or cointreau
for the icing
350g dark chocolate
225ml double cream
Put the whole oranges in a pan and cover with water. Bring tot he boil and simmer for about 30 mins.
Whizz them to a pulp in a food processor or a liquidiser (if you go down the liquidiser route you may have to cut them up into chunks before you put them in the goblet)
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water
In a very large bowl (this is the bowl the cake batter will all end up in) beat together the eggs, sugar and the oil (I used a balloon whisk)
Gradually beat in the orange puree, then the melted chocolate
Sift the dry ingredients together (or whisk together with another balloon whisk) and then mix into the egg mixture
Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour 20 minutes (a skewer inserted into the middle should come out clean)
Turn the cake out onto a wire rack to cool, and spoon over the orange liqueur to soak in while it is cooling
The icing
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water
Remove from the heat and allow to cool briefly
Stir in the cream and keep stirring till smooth and glossy
Set aside to cool and firm up slightly then spread over the cake with a palette knife
Serve with creme fraiche if you have any, if not, just eat it. In small slices, with a fork. It’s a VERY rich cake. But deliciously tasty – and usually I don’t approve of orange and chocolate together but this is my exception to that rule.
Over a year ago I bought a silicone pan to make wee heart-shaped cakes, intending to make wee treats of love for Valentines Day.
But I left the cake pan in Edinburgh, while I was enjoying Valentines in the country. So that didn’t work.
This year I remembered to bring the cake pan to the country, but had over-indulged so much already over the weekend that there was no way I was going to make any chocolate cakes, however cute and heart shaped they might be.
But this weekend was different.
I had a whole list of things to achieve: long walk with the dogs; drink with his kids in Glasgow; a couple of sewing projects to finish; soup to make; a curry to make (and eat); a greenhouse to clean and set up for the spring seed-sowing; laundry to wash and hang out; candle lit baths to loll about in. And I intended to do some veg bed digging too, but that didn’t get done. All the other things did get completed though (ish). And while I was on a roll, achieving so much, I ended up achieving more too – I made the cutest heart shaped gingery dark chocolate cakes. And it so happens they are perfect with fresh pears, not even poached, just chopped up and put in a bowl with all their juicy loveliness, accompanied by a sweet wee chocolate heart of cakey wonderfulness.
So, this is what I did:
Wee ginger chocolate hearts (or morsels of love)
Pre-heat oven to GM 5 or 6, if you don’t have a silicone cake pan, prepare either a 23cm sandwich tin, or a loaf tin, or put a load of paper cupcake cases in a muffin tin.
4oz soft butter (at room temperature if you have a warm room, otherwise pop it in the microwave at a low power setting in 20second bursts till it’s squishy soft)
4oz light muscovado sugar
2 eggs
2 TBsp syrup from a jar of stem ginger
3oz SR flour
1oz cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 balls of ginger from a jar of stem ginger, chopped fine
Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy
Add the eggs and ginger syrup and beat again. It’ll probably curdle, but don’t worry too much about it
Sift in the flour, cocoa and BP and beat again
Now fold in the ginger bits
Spoon the batter into the cake moulds (or sandwich tin or paper cases, or whatever you are using)
Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cakes are firm to touch
Delicious warm (heat up for 30s in the microwave) with that blackcurrant icecream I first made a few months ago. Or as I said, just with fresh pears. Or on their own, just as a wee treat with a cup of coffee.
Wee chocolate heart cakes
I suspect that they would be mighty scrumptious with a cream cheese icing too.
Or replace the ginger nibs with some frozen raspberries, scrunched, or chopped up, and serve with a raspberry coulis.
If you have a notion to make a tart mid-week, and you don’t get home till about 7pm then you really need to use bought pastry.
And if your rolling pin is in the country and you are in the city, then you need to use pre-rolled bought pastry.
So, I swallowed my pride and bought pre-rolled shortcrust pastry tonight. I think it may be a first. And now that my pride is well and truly swallowed, I can admit that it probably won’t be the last!
My notion was to make a rich chocolate tart. I’d been thinking of rich chocolate tart since before breakfast (I know, I know, this isn’t healthy behaviour) and then I went out to lunch with the lovely PAtothecity and she told me all about her fabulous Hotel Chocolat experience yesterday evening, including chilli hot chocolate. She asked how to make chilli hot choc, and I have a sneaky feeling I read a recipe for it just the other day, but have NO IDEA where, probably somewhere on this world wide web. Anyway, I suggested she split a chilli in half longways, de-seeded it and then popped the chilli in a pan with the milk. Warm it up and steep the chilli milk for a few minutes (depending on desired heat). Then remove the chillis, and add the chocolate, and warm to the right temperature for your hot choc.
With this in mind, I decided my chocolate tart would be a chilli chocolate tart. A RICH chilli chocolate tart. A rich chilli chocolate tart with sea salt flakes.
Rich chilli chocolate tart with sea salt flakes
Rich chilli chocolate tart with sea salt flakes
Preheat oven to 180C or Gas Mark 4. Grease a 23cm/9″ tart tin.
A packet of ready rolled short crust pastry, or if you have time, make your own pastry
300ml double cream
a couple of fresh red chillis
2 tsp caster sugar
50g unsalted butter
200g dark chocolate
a big glug of full fat milk
some maldon sea salt
Line the prepared tin with your rolled out pastry. Cover the pastry with a large piece of baking paper and fill the paper with dry chick peas, or baking beans* or rice, or whatever you can find in a packet or jar to weigh down the pastry.
Bake for 10-15 minutes
Take the pastry out of the oven and remove the paper and the baking beans
Return the pastry to the oven and bake for another 15 minutes, till golden brown
While it’s in the oven you can get going on the rich chocolatey-ness
Cut the chillis in half longways, and de-seed. Put them in a saucepan with the cream and warm up to not-quite-boiling
Leave to steep for a wee minute or two, and then remove the chillies (and throw them away)
Add the sugar and a pinch of salt to the cream and heat back up till it boils. Remove from the heat immediately, and add the butter and chocolate (broken into chunks) to the pan
Beat with a wooden spoon till all melted and glossy and nummy
Put aside for a wee minute or ten (depending on how cold your kitchen is – mine is freezing, so I just left it for a couple of minutes and it had cooled down quite a bit) and then add a glug or two of milk (about what you’d add to a mug of coffee.
Keep beating till it comes all glossy again
Now, if your pastry shell has just come out of the oven you’ll need it to cool a wee bit before you go any further
Once both shell and chocolatey goodness are cool-ish pour the choc mixture into the shell. Cool at room temperature, and then sprinkle with sea salt flakes
* Please do NOT use baked beans. It will get messy and will taste disgusting
If you have a hot kitchen, or if you like really cold things, cool it further down in the fridge. But personally, I’d serve it at room temperature, with a scoop of creme fraiche.
Now, all I have to do is work out how to get it to the office tomorrow morning.
And, given that St Valentine’s Day is next week, this might be an appropriate recipe for wooing your loved one. It would certainly work for me, but then I’m particularly susceptible to that chocolatey, salty, hot chilli combo of flavours. And not too sweet. All I need to know now is what wine to serve with it, as I suspect that it won’t work with fizz. Better ask Convivium Wine.
Tollhouse Cookies are a memory from my childhood. I had a recipe written in my childish hand-writing, which if memory serves me correctly had the list of ingredients but no instructions. I made them so often I didn’t need instructions and so I knew that they were the most delicious of cookies.
I’m pretty sure the recipe came from my Aunt Joyce, the Queen of Baking in my world. And I’m also fairly certain that the recipe is in my mother’s recipe book. So, if I really wanted I could no doubt get back the original, and make them exactly as they were in those eternally sunny summers back in the mid 70s. But I also recall that they had half lard, half butter (or even marg) … and I know that using half lard can make pastry beautifully short, but I don’t think I want to use lard in my biscuits any more. So, if I’m going to play about with the recipe anyway, I may as well just find a new one, and adapt from there.
So, this weekend I did some internet research, so you don’t have to. Although if you really want to find out more, you can do worse than starting out here on my friend wikipedia.
Now, a bit of background for you. One of the reasons I feel quite so strongly about Tollhouse Cookies might be because my father’s office was in the original Tollhouse in our town. I know it’s purely circumstantial, and literally hundreds of towns must have their own historical tollhouses, so clearly my recipe was no more authentic than any other. But, my recipe had choc chips AND nuts and I am not about to mess with my memory by either making a Tollhouse Cookie with no nuts, or re-naming the biscuits of my childhood Choc Chip n Nut Cookies.
But anyway, the research revealed a few things about 21st century tollhouse cookies: the butter should be melted and the sugar needs to be a mixture of brown/muscovado and caster – this will give a more caramelly taste and chewy texture, which works for me. And the cookies should be left on their baking sheet once nearly cooked so they complete the cooking out of the oven. No-one seemed to want to put nuts in them though, so feel free to omit them if you want. But then please just call them choc chip cookies.
Tollhouse cookies
Preheat oven to 170C or Gas Mark 3. Grease at least two baking sheets. Or I guess you could line them with baking parchment instead.
170g unsalted butter
250g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1/2 tsp salt
200g dark brown or muscovado sugar
100g light brown sugar (or caster)
1 TBSp vanilla extract
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
200g dark chocolate, chopped into wee chips
125g mixed nuts, chopped into wee chips. I’ve not tried it, but you could probably use salted nuts if you’re a fan of the sugar-salt-choc thing.
Melt the butter in a big bowl (this is the bowl that the whole mixture is going to end up in so make it big enough). I use a microwave to melt the butter, but of course you could melt it in a pan and then tip it into the bowl.
Sift the flour, bicarb and salt together in a different bowl – this is really just to mix it together, as most flour these days doesn’t need sifting – but it’s an old habit with me, so I like to sift it all
Add the sugars to the melted butter and beat with an electric beater (or a wooden spoon if you want to work off those bingo wings) until you have a light fluffy mixture
Now add the vanilla essence and the eggs and beat some more
Mix in the flour and stuff with a wooden spoon, then mix through the nuts and chocolate chips
Depending how warm your kitchen is, you’ll either have a soft-ish batter, or a much stiffer dough… my kitchen was baltic this weekend, so the butter cooled down quickly and I had quite a stiff dough
Now, how big do you want your cookies? I use about a soup-spoonful of mixture in a big lump, and they spread out to around 3-4 inches diameter. But you might want to make ENORMOUS cookies like those ones you get at train stations… you’d probably need about 4 TBsps of cookie mixture for that size.
Remember to leave gaps between each dollop of mixture – the larger the dollop the bigger the gap required. For the enormous ones you’ll need at least 3″ I’d say.
Bake for about 16 minutes, but this will depend on which shelf they are on in your oven, how hot the oven actually is and what size you’ve made your cookies. Ideally you need to take them out when they are golden around the edges, but not toasted in the middle. Leave them on the baking tray to cool down, they will continue to cook. Then remove them to a cooling tray. This will give you a slightly chewy cookie, if you prefer them crisper, just keep them in the oven a wee bit longer, till they are uniformly coloured.
Once they are cool, transfer them into two separate airtight containers. Keep one lot at home, and take the rest to your colleagues, or to someone you love (not mutually exclusive).
There! How easy was that? And according to my colleagues, they’re a winner.
But before you run off to bake cookies, a top tip for you. Some of you will know this already, but if you’re not a baker you might not. Don’t keep opening the oven door to check your cookies, and when you do open the door, be sure to shut it gently afterwards, as slamming it shut will blow in cold air, and mess with the cooking. This is even more important when you’re baking cakes, or anything you expect to rise. If you slam the door, it’s like slamming a big weight onto your delicate cake.
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