Tag Archives: biscuits

Chocolate chip cookies

13 Apr

chocolate chip cookies

This is a truly excellent chocolate chip cookie recipe. One of the things I like best is how a modest list of ingredients produces such a stellar result.

Even before these locked-down days, I’d come across a recipe with 250g best-quality chocolate, 4 eggs, two types of sugar, and bag of M&Ms thrown in for good measure, and think “of course that’s going to taste good – it’s a bunch of rich, sweet things mooshed together.”

We’ve made these chocolate chip cookies with plain and self-raising flour (no baking soda), wholewheat, and on one occasion khorasan flour. Dark chips, light chips, butterscotch chips or chopped baking chocolate. Whatever nuts we have on hand, or no nuts at all.

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Chocolate sugar cookies

21 May

Chocolate sugar cookies

Chocolate sugar cookies aren’t on the decadent, gooey, indulgent end of the chocolate spectrum. They’re simple, satisfying, and slightly old-fashioned.

Chocolate sugar cookies are firm with just a bit of give – the addition of baking powder giving them a subtle cakiness. Adam describes them as “chocolate pudding in a biscuit.”

Because they keep their shape so well, chocolate sugar cookies make excellent filled biscuits – or little ice cream sandwiches. Continue reading →

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Pepparkakor (Swedish ginger biscuits)

7 Sep

Pepparkakor (Swedish ginger biscuits)

“Oh, reindeer biscuits!” my daughter said when she saw these cooling on the rack. “Are they for Christmas?” “They’re moose biscuits,” I told her, “and they’re for the Great British Bake-off biscuit week.”

Why moose biscuits? Because I’m a proud, moose-loving Canadian, of course. (And also because it’s the only non-Christmas-shaped biscuit cutter I own…)

When making cut-out biscuits, it’s important to choose the right sort of dough. It’s dispiriting to go to the effort to cut out little bells and Christmas trees, say, and end up with indistinguishable, amorphous blobs.

Of the three go-to biscuit doughs I use to make cut-out biscuits, this pepparkakor one is my favourite. It hardly spreads at all during baking, and the resulting biscuits are fragrantly spiced, and satisfyingly crisp.

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Lemon gems

13 Aug

Lemon gems

Lemon gems (or fried egg biscuits, as they are known round here), are delightfully crumbly-yet-crisp, tart little morsels of loveliness. Plus they look so cute! Continue reading →

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Mum’s shortbread

8 Dec

Shortbread

For a recipe with so few ingredients, it is surprising how variable shortbread can be. I am completely loyal to my mother’s shortbread recipe, having never tasted anything to equal it.

Rolled thin, decorated with a single silver ball, and baked until the edges were tinged with gold, mum’s shortbread were always light and crumbly-crisp.

When you bit into one, after a second’s resistance it would dissolve deliciously in your mouth, leaving that little silver ball on your tongue like a seashell stranded by a receding wave for you to dispatch with a single, satisfying crunch.

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Oatmeal school cookies

18 Oct

Oatmeal school cookies

Oatmeal school cookies strike the right balance between healthy and treat. Despite the wholewheat flour and wheat germ, there’s just enough sugar and butter to spare them  being worthy.

I’ve made these cookies dozens of times, using whatever dried fruit I have on hand, or swapping the fruit for chocolate chips.

They are just as nice with nuts – but then they wouldn’t be school cookies, unless your school is bucking the “nut-free-zone” trend.

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Cranberry and white chocolate chip oatmeal cookies

1 Aug

cranberry-white-chocolate-biscuits

I know we’re due for another trip to Canada when my precious stash of butterscotch chips has run out…;-)

On the few occasions I’ve seen butterscotch chips for sale in the UK, they were in the specialty imports section and crazy expensive. So I tuck a few bags into my suitcase whenever we make the trip home. And Canadian houseguests have been known to arrive bearing butterscotch chips for me (and Goldfish crackers for the girls).

When oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies aren’t an option, these cranberry and white chocolate numbers are a decent alternative.

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Snickerdoodles

21 Feb

Snickerdoodles

Snickerdoodles… the name alone is reason enough to make them. They are also delicious, with a cakey, almost doughnuty, texture. They are sturdy little numbers, well suited to packed lunches. When I worked as a bush cook, I would often make snickerdoodles for my tree planting crew. Continue reading →

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Uncooked cookies

25 Nov

Unbaked cookies

I adored these cookies when I was a child. We didn’t have them often – I imagine my mum considered them too sugary to make them regularly. I even remember her telling me she’d lost the recipe, and making her usual granola cookies instead. Continue reading →

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Tahini cookies

11 Nov

tahini cookies

Like most schools these days, ours is a “nut-free zone”. While peanuts are their main concern, they have banned all nuts to be on the safe side. This has led to considerable confusion about what counts as a nut – are coconuts allowed? Pine nuts? Sunflower seeds?

Strictly speaking they are all seeds – peanuts, almonds, coconuts, sesame seeds, the lot… And which seeds are considered nuts depends on whether you ask a cook or a botanist.

It’s very different to my school days, when half the class brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches daily, and peanut butter cookies were standard lunchbox fare. Continue reading →

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Oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies

10 Nov

Butterscotch oaties

I only recently learned the difference between caramel and butterscotch. Caramel is white sugar that has been boiled until it darkens, while butterscotch is made with brown sugar and butter. I’m a great fan of both, which is why I love these oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies. An oatmeal chocolate chip cookie is a fine thing, but to my mind these are even better. Continue reading →

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Baking powder biscuits

8 Sep

Baking powder biscuits

My mother used to say, “use a new word ten times and it’s yours”. She applied the same method to teaching me to cook. When I was eight years old, she had me make baking powder biscuits ten times over a couple of weeks, until I mastered them.

Many years later, I still remember the recipe and adapt it to all sorts of things. I make them larger and smaller, thicker and thinner. I sometimes add cheese or herbs to the dough (cheddar and dill biscuits are particularly nice). I always save any bacon fat or chicken fat in the fridge, and it makes a delicious biscuit when swapped for the margarine. Continue reading →

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