Brown Bread, Brown Scones, and Peanut Butter Cookies!

Lots and lots of food!

Yes, I'm finally making a proper post! The baking is back :) And there's more good news! I'm buying my own computer for my room, so that means I'll be able to update way more often! I like it when things work out my way ;) And now onto some good ol' helathy baked goods...

I got 'The Avoca Cafe' cookbook out of the library a couple of weeks ago and was really impressed by it. The majority of the recipes seem pretty straightforward and they're not over complicated, yet they produce really tasty things! I decided to be good and try their brown bread and brown scones.

The bread worked out best - it was proper brown bread with lots of 'stuff' in it. I never used treacle before, it's so much fun to spoon into the mixture, though it is slightly ominous looking and I was really paranoid about using too much.

Yay polkadots!

Recipe: Avoca Brown Bread Ingredients:

• 200g white flour
• 300g coarse brown flour
• 3 handfuls bran
• 2 handfuls wheatgerm
• 2 heaped teaspoons baking powder
• 1 level teaspoon salt
• 1 dessertspoon treacle
• 600-900ml milk

Method:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
2. Add the treacle and stir in enough of the milk to give a moist, but not sloppy, consistancy.
3. Transfer mixture to a well-oiled 900g loaf tin and bake in an oven preheated to 240 degrees C/ 475 F for 20 minutes until risen.
4. Reduce heat to 150 C/ 300F and bake for a further hour.
5. Run a knife around the tin and ease the bread out. If it sounds hollow when tapped it's cooked, if not return it to the oven for 10-15 minutes.

Healthy and Delicious :)

This is a really good recipe if you want to bake your own brown bread every couple of days. It's so quick to put together and dosen't require anything complicated, I think it's brilliant. It gives a really dense, moist loaf, that tastes great with just about anything on it.

Oats so good

I was less pleased with the way my scones turned out, though I think it was more my fault that the recipe's. The dough was rolled out a little too thin for my liking, so they were more like little biscuits than proper scones, but they still tasted good. I would definitly make them again, but I'd double the recipe and make them good and thick.

Recipe: Avoca Brown Scones

Mmmm, baked...

Ingredients:

• 450g coarse, brown flour
• 110 g unsalted butter, diced
• 2 tablespoons greek youghurt
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 75-150 ml milk
• 1 egg beaten with water to glaze

Method:

1. Put the flour and salt in a bowl and rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
2. Make a well in the center and add the yoghurt and bicarbonate of soda. Leave to react for a couple of minutes and then add 75ml of the milk and mix well. You may need to add more milk, depending on humidity.
3. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and rould out to 2.5 cm thick. Cut out with a round cutter and transfer to a greased baking sheet.
4. Brush with egg glaze and bake in and oven preheated to 180 degrees C/ 350 F for 15-20 minutes.

Peanut Butter!

I've been wanting to make peanut butter cookies for ages, but since there's only me and my sister who actually like peanut butter I've been hesitant (and rightly so, most of these ended up going in the bin >_<). Still, I decided to give it a go. I got the recipe from my trusty old 'What's Cooking: Baking', I no longer need to talk about the merits of this particular collection, I think it's fairly obvious I love it :)

Recipe: Peanut Butter Cookies

Ingredients:

• 125g/ 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 150g/ 1/2 cup chunky peanut butter
• 225g/ 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 150g/ 1 1/4 cups plain flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 75g unsalted peanuts, chopped

Method:

1. Lightly grease two baking trays
2. In a large mixing bowl beat together the butter and sugar
3. gradually add the sugar and beat well
4. Add the beaten egg a little at a time
   
5. Sieve the flour, baking powder, and salt into the peanut butter mixture
6. Add the peanuts and bring all the ingredients together to form a soft dough. Wrap and leave to chill for 30 minutes
7. Form the dough into 20 balls and place them on the baking trays and allow for spreading. Flatten them with your hand
8. Bake in an oven preheated to 190 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes until golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack and leave to cool.
   

Sandy!

These were kinda bizzarly textured, they were like sand! It wasn't necessarily a bad thing, I just didn't particularly like it. They kind of crumbled away when you bit into them, it was odd. Still, they tasted like peanut butter and that's what counts. They certainly aren't the best cookies I've ever made, they didn't 'dissapear' like others did. I don't think I'll be making these again, but I'm going to try other peanut butter ones.

Okay, I think that's it for now. I'll be back again soon, hopefully from a shiny new computer...

Chocolate Malt Cookies

Cookies!

Apologies for the lack of updates lately, I'm doing a summer camp for the next two weeks so there's not a whole lot of baking going on. There's singing instead! We're doing (DON'T LAUGH!) High School Musical! It's possibly the worst-written thing on the planet, but there people there are sound so it's fun.
For some reason there has been a severe lack of cookie baking going on in this blog, and I intend to put a stop to that right now. I don't know why it is, I guess cookies were some of the first things I baked and now I want to try other stuff. Still, cookies have to be of my favourite things, there's something really satisfying about making them, I guess it's 'cause you get so many at the end ^_^
We, me and my sister, made these cookies after we devoured our pizza and realised we had no dessert! Sure, it was around eleven o'clock, but it's never too late for baking ;)

I love patterned paper :)

Recipe: Malted Drop Cookies

Ingredients:

• 125g butter, softened
• 100g sugar
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 5 tablespoons chocolate malt powder
• 100g plain flour
• 50g rolled oats

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C/ 375 F. Line two baking sheets with non-stick paper.
2. Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Sift the chocolate malt powder and flour together and beat into the creamed mixture along with the oats until all the ingredients are well combined.
3. Drop heaped teaspoons of the dough onto the baking sheets, spacing well apart. Bake in the oven until just golden, 10-12 minutes. Leave to cool on the sheets for a few minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.
   

Now that's a flat cookie

The recipe was taken from Cookies Galore - I never seem to bake cookies from anywhere else these days. We didn't really change much except we used 2 tablespoons chocolate powder and 3 tablespoons malt powder instead of the chocolate malt powder 'cause we didn't have any. We were kinda surprised with how these came out, they were really, really flat. The recipe didn't have any raising agent in it and it makes me wonder if perhaps it was left out by mistake. Perhaps they're meant to be like this, but I'd like to try them again with a bit of baking powder. I've never actually tried adding a raising agent to a recipe before, any tips? I take it I should just find a similar recipe and see how much powder that uses.
Still, they tasted good. I'd probably add some more oats next time too, but they deliver what they promise: Chewy, chocolaty goodness.
I'm going to leave it at that for now, I'm exhausted after today. I'll try and update again this week, but I'm not making any promises ;)

Choc Chip Oat Cookies

Oaty Good!

I love oats. Seriously, I think I would die without them. I have to have a bowl of porridge at least once a day or I will die, it's a fact of my biology. There's just something so wonderful about them, they're the perfect comfort food. And the squidgier they are the better. So when you combine that with dark chocolate you just can't have a problem, it's not possible.

This recipe is everything oat cookies should be. They're crunchy on the outside but really chewey on the inside, provided you don't over cook them. There isn't so much chocolate in them that you can't taste anything else, but they still have lots of flavor. I'm really not joking about how good they are, every time I bake them they're gone withing a couple of hours.
The recipe is, once again, from Cookies Galore, definitly my favourite out of the 'Galore' series. I make recipes from it quite often, there are lots of different recipes and most of them don't involve too many ingredients.

Recipe: Oatmeal Choc Chip Cookies (Sorry for the lack of American Measurements, the book dosen't have them >_<)

Ingredients:
150g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
175g unsalted butter, softened
100g soft dark brown sugar (I used light brown and it worked fine)
100g sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
250g rolled oats
75g dark chocolate chips

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius. Grease and line two baking sheets.

2. In a large bowl, stir together the flour and baking powder

3. In a large mixing bowl and using a hand-held electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars together until light and fluffy. Add the egg and beat until combined. Stir in the vanilla. With the mixer on low speed or using a wooden spoon, gradually add the flour mixture until combined. Stir in the oats and chocolate chips.

4. Drop rounded tablespoons of the dough, well spaced apart on to the baking sheets. Leave space between each one for spreading. Flatten each cookie slightly with the back of a spoon. Bake until golden for 12-15 minutes.

5. Remove to a wire cooling rack and cool.

I'd just like to thank everyone for their help with the Angel Food Cake, I've worked out what went wrong and am looking forward to trying it properly as soon as I get the right tin for it :)

Cat Cookies!

I felt really cruel eating these!

I was inspired to make these cookies after seeing bluemotion's post at bakebakebake (which is an AMAZING community that was the real reason I begain baking in the first place, but more on that later). I fell in love with the idea of making cute shaped cookies and couldn't help myself, I had to give it a go. The original creator said it was just a kind of shortbread formed into little cat shapes and covered in icing,so I didn't see why it wouldn't work for me. However, lots of people seem to have had trouble with them in the past, so I was cautious. A special thanks to Bluemotion for then inspiration for these cookies

Having read bluemotion's post and examining other attempts at these cookies I decided not to put anything in the center of them and just go for a solid cookie, meaning that I had to bake them quite small otherwise they wouldn't cook thoroughly. I choose a recipe that was meant to be baked in a cake tin, hoping that this would ensure the cookie would cook all the way through. The recipe is once again taken from 'Baking' by Emma Patmore, this book will be with me forever.
Originally I was planning on dipping them in dark chocolate and the icing on the faces using white chocolate, but since they were a bit of an experiment and the only chocolate I had was Lindt 70% coca I didn't want to be wasteful, so I went with a simple glaze made from icing sugar and milk, and used then end of a Wonderbar chocolate flavoured coting for the features (I think this was bought in the days when I didn't know a whole lot about baking).

They're like a little family!

Recipe: Shortbread Cat cookies

Ingredients:

125g/ 1/2 cup butter, softened
40g/ 8tsp granulated sugar
25g/ 8 tsp icing sugar
225/ 2 cups plain flour
Pinch of salt
2-3 tsp water

Method:

In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter and the sugars until light and fluffy.
Sift the flour and salt into the creamed mixture. Add the water and bring together to form a soft dough.
On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough into a 20cm round and cover with cling-film. Refrigrate for about half an hour.

Heat oven to 160 degrees C/ 300 F
Remove from cling-film and place on a lightly floured surface. Break off small clumps of dough and shape them into rounds, then use your fingers to pinch up little ears. Be careful not to make them too big or they won't cook through, but don't make the ears too small either or they will become too hard during baking and bread off.
Place on a greased baking try and cook in an oven for about 30-40 minutes, it depends on the size of your cats, until golden and crisp.
Leave to cool

The decoration is up to you really. I just mixed some icing sugar with water to form a glaze, dipped the cats in it and left it to set. Then I melted some Wonderbar "chocolate" and used a (clean!) paintbrush to add the freatures ( I really have to master the art of piping-bag making). I think they would be amainzing with a dark chocolate coating and white choclate filling, but that's just me. Oh, and don't forget to dip the ears in chocolate, I think it's the icing on the cake ^_^

Bye!