Salted choc chip cookies

September 8, 2024

   

One of my friends made us a little batch of choc chip cookies as a thank you gift and they were the most delicious treat I've had in ages. I hit her up for the recipe and got cracking on making another batch so I could feast on them again almost immediately. The original recipe is from this Basics with Babish video, helpfully transcribed on reddit. 

There's a tiny bit of faffing around in that you've gotta brown your butter and then cool it down again, but once you've managed that everything falls into place pretty easily. I would definitely recommend a generous sprinkle of salt on top as soon as they come out of the oven, it really takes them to the next level.

This recipe makes a pretty big batch, but we'd eaten them all inside four days - it's impossible to stop. 

Salted choc chip cookies

(based on this recipe from Babish)

250g unsalted butter

1/2 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

2 1/4 cups plain flour

1 tablespoon salt

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

2 cups dark chocolate chips

1/2 cup pecans

fleur de sel (or other salty flakes) for sprinkling

In a small frying pan melt and then gently brown your butter - I wasn't sure how far to push it, but be careful not to burn it. Kill the heat and pour it into a container to pop in the fridge/freezer so it re-solidifies.

Once you've got some solid brown butter, preheat your oven to 180°C.

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter with the caster and brown sugar until they're well combined. Add the eggs one at a time and keep beating until it's combined smoothly. 

Sift the flour into a separate bowl and stir through the salt, bicarb soda and cinnamon. Slowly add the flour mix into the buttery bowl, mixing it all together. Once it's all combined, stir through the choc chips and pecans and your mix is done. 

Dollop out the mixture onto baking trays lined with grease-proof paper - keep the dollops pretty small (like a heaped teaspoon) and spaced apart, they'll spread. I reckon we got about 25-30 cookies out of the mix. 

Bake for about 14 minutes, sprinkling with fleur de sel as soon as each batch comes out - leave them to cool before you try to move them around too much, they're pretty delicate. 

Spiced chocolate cake

September 3-4, 2024

   

I prefer collaboration over competition every time. There's a baking event within my work environment each year, and my local team choose to work on a project together rather than individually submitting entries. It's symptomatic of why I like working here so much! This year fourteen of us prepared cake with various shades of icing and sliced them into squares to form a pixelated image. I was lucky to be assigned 'almost black' - easily achieved with a dark chocolate ganache and a touch of black food colouring.

I volunteered to make something vegan, and turned to the classic Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World to try a new cake. I was tempted by the peanut butter cake and the chai-spiced cake but ultimately went for the Mexican Hot Chocolate cake, which looked like a crowd-pleaser. It aims for a slightly grainy texture and complex flavour with coconut milk, flax seeds, almond meal, cinnamon, cayenne, vanilla and almond essence all in the mix. The recipe is designed to make a dozen cupcakes sprinkled with sugar, cinnamon and cocoa but a square cake with a ganache topping better suited my purpose.

This cake achieves that excellent complexity but - I chuckled to myself as I ate a small leftover piece last night - more than anything it evokes the softness of a Coles chocolate mud cake. It's the flavour of cinnamon and cayenne that set this cake apart.

   

Spiced chocolate cake

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero's

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World)

cake batter

1 cup coconut milk

1 tablespoon ground flax seeds

3/4 cup plain flour

2 tablespoons cornflour

1/4 cup almond meal

1/2 cup cocoa 

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

generous pinch of cayenne pepper

1 cup caster sugar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon almond essence

chocolate ganache

4 tablespoons coconut milk

75g dark chocolate chips

3 tablespoons golden or maple syrup

Preheat an oven to 180°C. Line a 22cm square cake tin with paper, or line a muffin tray with cupcake papers.

In a large bowl, whisk together the coconut milk and flax seeds. Allow them to sit for 10 minutes so that the seeds thicken the milk.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, cornflour, almond meal, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb soda, salt, cinnamon and cayenne.

When the coconut milk-seed mixture is ready, whisk in the sugar, oil, vanilla and almond essence. Gradually add the flour mixture and mix well. Pour the cake batter into the baking tin(s) and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the cake passes the skewer test. Allow the cake to cool before applying the ganache.

When the cake has cooled, make the ganache. Place the coconut milk in a small saucepan and heat until almost boiling. Turn off the heat and add the chocolate, stirring until the chocolate is entirely melted. Whisk in the syrup. The ganache might look quite runny; if that's the case you can let it sit a while to thicken slightly. Gently pour the ganache over the cake(s) and allow it to set a while (although it will still be soft) before serving.

Mushroom & walnut samosas

August 29, 2024

   

Last Thursday I was trawling around for dinner ideas; I didn't seem to be in the mood for any of our usual favourites. I didn't recognise this Meera Sodha recipe for mushroom and walnut samosas at all when I found it among my bookmarks, but I liked the concept anew and gave it a go.

A large volume of mushrooms goes into the filling, and Sodha gives us the option of throwing them into a food processor rather than slowly, finely chopping the lot. It's a handy approach but I'd still recommend some patience with pulsing the mushrooms in small batches. I tried to process too many at once and ended up with an uneven, mostly very-finely-ground mixture. Filo pastry packets don't translate precisely across countries, so I just winged it with quantities that felt right and used up most of a box.

My approach generated about 30 golden packages of subtle savoury goodness. Though they're intended as an entree or snack to be shared around, we piled the samosas into shallow bowls for dinner and loved smearing them with lime pickle. The samosas also teamed brilliantly with a green bean salad that echoes the mustard seed and lime (we've been making it on and off for 18 years!). We relished two rounds of leftovers at home, where we were able to crisp up the pastries again in the oven.

   

Mushroom & walnut samosas

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Meera Sodha on The Guardian)

120g walnuts

600g mushrooms

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

3/4 teaspoon black mustard seeds

3/4 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon nigella seeds

1 large onion, finely diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon ginger, minced

2 green chillies, finely chopped

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground pepper

~220g filo pastry

spray oil or melted margarine

Grind the walnuts finely in a food processor and transfer them to a bowl. Pulse the mushrooms in a food processor in batches, until they're roughly pea-sized. (Don't over-fill the container, I did and ended up with very unevenly blended mushroom pieces.)

Set a large frypan over medium heat and pour in the oil. Add the mustard, cumin and nigella seeds. When they start to pop, add the onion and cook, stirring regularly, until soft and starting to brown (up to 10 minutes). Add the garlic, ginger and chilli, and cook for a further 5 minutes. Sodha says the onions should look like 'dark jewels'. Add the mushrooms and gently fold them through the onions, cooking for about 7 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and cook until all the liquid is evaporated, about 15 more minutes. (Be fussy about this! Too much moisture will make for soggy samosas.) Stir in the walnuts and cook for 3 minutes. At long last, turn off the heat and allow the filling to cool.

Preheat an oven to 220°C and line two baking trays with paper.

Unwrap the filo pastry and keep the unused bits lightly wrapped in a damp teatowel as you go. Slice through all the layers to form a rectangle roughly 23 cm x 10 cm - for me, that was the bottom quarter of the sheets. Take one piece and place about a tablespoon of the filling in the corner closest to you. Wrap the pastry upwards at 45 degrees to form a triangle; keep wrapping up and up to preserve the triangle shape and use up the whole rectangle. Apply a bit of oil/margarine to the outside and give the samosa a second wrapping. Place the samosa on a baking tray and repeat the wrapping process until all the filling is used up.

Apply a bit more oil/margarine to the samosas and bake for 15 minutes, until brown and crispy. Serve with chutney or pickle.