Confessions of a cookie dough addict

This is real people. Cookie dough addiction is no laughing matter! In the last few weeks, I’ve made cookie dough brownies, some other cookie dough brownies and HUGE giant cookies and I’m beginning to fear that I can’t live without my weekly dose of cookie dough.

 

Since those of us who have a weakness for the stuff can’t really be eating big batches of it all the time, I devised this recipe which gives you a small portion of cookie dough – perfect for those days when you NEED cookie dough. You can also use it to make one big cookie, for those times when you have to have freshly baked cookie but don’t want a whole batch of them.

First, mix together one tablespoon each of soft unsalted butter and either white or light brown sugar. Then, add a tablespoon of milk (any kind) in lieu of an egg, and a little dash of vanilla extract or paste too if you’re feelin’ fancy! Next, add around a tablespoon of chocolate chips or chunks (or oatmeal and raisins, if you want a different kind of cookie) and then add your flour. I used plain flour and you’ll need between 2 and 3 tablespoons – add it gradually and stop when you get to a cookie dough consistency you’re happy with.

Thats it…… cookie dough in seconds! Now the decision is yours, eat the cookie dough or wait for the cookie….

I’ll leave you to guess which option I chose….

x Kerry


Salted pretzel chocolate chip cookies

I’ve become a little bit obsessed with chocolate pretzels lately. I reviewed this M&S version, made these cookies, and I’ve been fantasizing about these chocolate pretzel cupcakes and chocolate chip pretzel bars a little too much, frankly!

I googled ‘chocolate cookies’ (does anyone else find themselves using google to search for recipes even though they have stacks and stacks of cookbooks on their shelves? Sometimes I even find and make recipes that I have in my cookbooks!) and this Nigella recipe for totally chocolate cookies popped up. Perfect! I jigged with the quantities a bit, taking out some of the chocolate chips and replacing them with broken up pretzels!

  • 100g dark or plain chocolate, melted in the microwave
  • 150g flour
  • 30g cocoa, sieved
  • 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 125g soft butter
  • 75g light brown sugar
  • 50g white sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 egg
  • 150g dark chocolate chips (I used plain chocolate cut into large chunks)
  • 200g broken up pretzels. I broke them up by hand and used Tesco pretzels, the M&S ones are very nice too!

You’ll need to preheat your oven to 150 degrees / gas mark 5 if you’re planning on baking the cookies right away.

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First, cream the soft butter with the light brown and caster sugar.

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Add vanilla extract, the egg, chocolate chunks, pretzel bits and melted chocolate.

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Then sift in your plain flour and cocoa powder and also add the bicarb of soda and salt.

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It should all come together in a fairly stiff dough. At this point, you can use a spoon or your hands to pinch off walnut-sized pieces of the dough, roll into a rough ball and then pop onto a baking tray. Or if you prefer to eat some or all of the cookies later, turn the dough out onto some clingfilm, and mould it into a log shape (or something similar!). Then you can cover with clingfilm and leave in the fridge or freezer until you’re ready to cook. When you are, just use a sharp serrated knife to slice off cookies from the log.

Cook for 10-15 minutes at 150 degrees/gas mark 5. Check them after about 7-8 minutes, and I always rotate cookies from the top and middle shelves of my oven so that none of them get too browned.

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Enjoy!

x Kerry


Nutella Giveaway – WIN one of three free jars!

This is a sponsored post. All the opinions are mine!

I can’t have nutella in my house usually since if I do, all willpower soon flies out of the window, to be replaced with nutella with every meal. The darn stuff is just so addictive. Normally, I would have muesli or porridge for breakfast, but if there’s nutella in the house, breakfast will involve nutella. Every meal becomes a nutella delivery system. If the day ever comes when I can have a jar of nutella in the house without furtively dipping a spoon into it at least once a day, I will know I have finally reached the giddy heights of adulthood.

But lately, the lovely folks at Nutella sent me some jars so that I could whip up some delicious treats with them and share it with you! They are also kindly giving away three large jars of Nutella to three lucky Kerrycooks readers! I know that you’re all responsible adults who can handle having Nutella around!

While I was brainstorming the Nutella trips that I wanted to whip up, I enjoyed some Nutella toast. Okay, a lot of Nutella toast.

Picture credit

And some Nutella pancakes

And then I made Cinnamon buns with Nutella!

And then I was all out of Nutella.

Whoops.

Learn from my mistakes. Enter the giveaway and make yourself some Nutella cupcakes, Nutella flapjacks or some Nutella banana muffins.

Next, I’m going to make these amazing Nutella stuffed chocolate cookies. Just as soon as I can find a secure place to store my Nutella.

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on this post! You’ll need to be from the UK in order to be entered to win! The closing date is January 20th 2012.


Review : Cadburys Fabulous Fingers, Twirl Bites and Fox’s Chunkie Caramel cookies

Hmm. Despite the inevitable new years resolution to eat more healthfully I appear to have been trying a lot of new chocolate lately!

Fabulous Fingers

I had gotten from somewhere the incorrect idea that the new fabulous fingers were GIANT fingers. I think it comes from the packaging above, where they’ve zoomed right into the finger on the right so you can see the layers. So when I bought these (for a £1 at Asda, the RRP is £1.99), I was mightily disappointed that they were regular old finger sized – indeed they seem stubbier than normal fingers.

However they are very tasty indeed with the two layers of chocolate adding up to a moreish mouthful (ooh alliteration!). I would buy these again if I was going over to someones house and needed something to munch on, but only at the bargainous £1 price and not at any more than that – its just not very good value for money at the full RRP at all.

Twirl Bites

I loooooove the little mini twirls that you get in boxes of Cadbury Heros. They’re amazing. So Twirl Bites were always going to be something I loved as clearly I love the original twirl. I didn’t love them as much as I thought though, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, they look NOTHING like the picture on the bag and nothing like the mini Twirls in heros. I suspect, although it may just be a ridiculous conspiracy theory, that the proliferation of kit kat bites, twirl bites and all the other bites about at the moment are as a result of the fact that its a cost effective way to turn the offcuts of producing the bar into a marketable product. They’ve taken something that would probably have been consigned to the bin before and are now selling them. Check out how the Twirl Bites actually look -

Picture : Splodzblogz

Not very appetizing is it? Whats more the bites are all jagged and misshapen and lumpy, I don’t know if its scientific or psychological but they don’t actually taste as good as the little Twirls from heros!

Twirl Bites are £2.03 RRP with frequent BOGOF offers on them, and I got mine for £1.29 from Home & Bargains.  I wouldn’t buy them again :-(

Chunkie Caramel cookies

Sorry for the small picture – it was the best I could find on the web!

This new caramel version of Fox’s chunkie chocolate-chip chocolate-covered cupcakes is similar to the other versions (chocolate chip, white chocolate chip and chocolate chup – coated) which are AWESOME. There is no better complement to a cup of tea than one of those bad boys. These new biscuits seem to be the same as the usual milk chocolate version, but with added caramel flavouring. If I’d thought about it for a second I probably wouldn’t have grabbed these off the shelf as I don’t enjoy the taste of artificial caramel flavouring at all. I’m not sure anyone does? I was expecting some kind of liquid caramel element as with Fox’s AMAZING millionaire’s shortcake biscuits. So these biscuits aren’t for me and I wouldn’t be buying them again but Fox’s are still my favourite biscuits overall!


Homemade Christmas Tree Shortbread – perfect for gifts!

Its nearly Christmas – hurrah! Have you finished your Christmas shopping yet? If you’re considering heading out to the shops today, take my advice….. don’t! Instead dig into your kitchen cupboards, borrow a cup of flour from your next door neighbour if you have to and make some homemade Christmas cookies. Unless you’re dealing with a particularly obnoxious 13 year old who had their heart set on a new xbox for Christmas, I can guarantee that your friends and family will be touched and delighted to receive homemade gifts.

You can decorate these Christmas cookies with whatever you want, silver or gold balls would be lovely, or hundreds and thousands too. I used red and green tree sprinkles and smarties (to represent baubles!) as well as some little gold stars that I had.

Here’s how to make them!

  • 1-3/4 cups plain flour
  • 1/2 cup corn flour
  • 1 egg
  • pinch salt
  • 1 cup very soft butter
  • 1/2 cup icing sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

To make the dough, sift your flour, corn flour and salt into a bowl and soften your butter in the microwave and then add the icing sugar and cream them together and beat it the egg. Add the dry ingredients and bring together to form a very soft dough (you may need to add a little more flour if its too sticky). Wrap in clingfilm or tin foil and refrigerate for an hour.

I hate it when recipes tell you to refrigerate things because it means more time until I can eat them but in this case its definitely the best thing to do. The dough is so much more easy to handle after that hour.

Check out my collection of cookie cutters! I have three hearts, a cat, a holly leaf, a teddy bear, a snowman, an angel, a star, some round ones, a christmas tree and one that I can’t for the life of me identify!

Once they’ve been in the fridge for an hour, preheat your oven to 160 degrees/gas mark 6 and sprinkle some flour on your work surface. Roll out your dough, making sure the surface and rolling pin are well floured, to about a 1cm thickness and start cutting out your shapes!

I went for a variety of shapes – Christmas trees, stars and holly leaves. Let them cook for about 12-15 minutes, keeping a close eye on them and whipping them out as soon as you say a hint of colour around the edges.

Time to decorate! To make the royal icing, take 300g of confectioners/icing sugar and add water, a teaspoon at a time, until you get to a thick dripping consistency. To make the decorating clean up easier, I put some clingfilm underneath the cooling rack that I was decorating the biscuits on so that the excess icing could drip onto that.

Holding the biscuits over the icing bowl, drop a teaspoon of icing on top and use it to guide the icing into the corners of the biscuit. Add your sprinkles or smarties straight away so that they stick and pop the biscuit back onto the cooling rack to dry.

Since I had some leftover green and red fondant in my cupboard from making my festive velvet cake so I decided to use the same holly cutter to cut out some green fondant to cover the cookies. I added some icing to the top to act as glue and then patted the fondant down.

What do you think of my Christmas cookies?

These icing on these biscuits isn’t perfect. But they are delicious. Package up in a presentation bag (mine are from Lakeland) or you could use a small cardboard box (cut off the whole of the top of the box, wrap the remaining box with Christmas wrapping paper (newspaper would be lovely too), put the biscuits inside and then cover the top with a layer of clingfilm and a bow!

Happy Christmas!


Winging it chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies

While I was ill I really needed some freshly baked cookies. Not shop-bought biscuits, definitely homemade ones. So I scrounged around in the cupboard for ingredients and found butter, flour and a few chocolate chips. But no eggs. Most cookie recipes have at least one. So I decided to wing it with no eggs and use a splash of milk instead.

Now I know that making cookies by winging it instead of following a recipe is maybe kind of scary, and its not something I’d do if I was making cookies that had to turn out right. But if you’re an experienced baker then its really easy to do!

I started with about half a pack of soft butter, and added the same amount (what looked like the same amount!) of caster sugar – I mixed them up with some vanilla bean extract. Yum.

Next I added a generous splash of milk, a tsp each of bicarb and baking powder and plain flour. Enough until it started to look like cookie dough.

And then a bit more, for safety.

I decided to make two types of cookies, chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin so I divided my batter up at this stage.

and added oats, raisins and a dash of cinnamon to one.

and chocolate chips to the other. I splodged onto a baking tray and cooked for about 15 minutes at around 160 degrees and voila – amazing smelling, comforting home-baked cookies.

I wasn’t able to get a picture of the oatmeal and raisin ones because I ate them so quickly – they were amazing!!! I made them on a whim as its not normally the kind of cookie that would appeal to me but the homemade version was fantastic. Chewy, thick, oaty and delicious. The chocolate chip cookies spread more, probably because the oats in the other cookies helped to keep them together – but they still tasted great, especially the next day.


Stop what you’re doing and look at this

The best funny, cute, delicious videos/pictures/recipes/thingamajigs from the internet this week! Enjoy!

Question – what does an alpaca/llama look like when you shave back its fur?!


Guest post : Kat’s healthy dessert recipes!

I’m so very excited to have my first ever guest post here on Kerrycooks! Kathleen from over at Kat’s Health Corner very kindly answered my call for guest bloggers, and will be telling you a bit about a subject I know almost nothing about – healthy versions of decadent desserts! Take it away Kat!

Kathleen from Kat's Health Corner

Kathleen

My name is Kathleen and I blog over at KatsHealthCorner. I am so glad that Kerry asked me to do a Guest Post for her, and I am here to show you some of my favorite Healthified Dessert Recipes!

My philosophy is that food can be both healthy AND delicious. That is one thing I live by – Healthy, in a Yummilicious sort of way.

My passions include baking and health. And not only that, but one of my favorite pastimes is taking a recipe and making it healthier.

Some of my favorite recipes that are healthified include

Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

My Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. In these cookies, I use a secret ingredient – WHITE BEANS! What?! Beans in cookies?! I’m crazy?! YEP! :D With these, you not only get a yummy treat, but also sneak in the healthy stuff – without ever tasting it!

My Single Lady Banana Cream Pies. These are one of my favorite desserts – and my sister’s too! I have sold her on these – she loves them SO much! These Banana Cream Pies are a single serving, so you don’t have to make a whole batch to handle a craving. And not only that, but they are SO incredibly nutritious!

My Banana Chocolate Brownies. Do you like Brownies? Well I DO! And not only do these taste amazing, but they have whole grains, bananas, healthy fats, and a good source of protein from the beans. They are Healthy that Taste Naughty. :)

My Nutty Apple Spice Cookies. These are made both without oil OR sugar! Cookies without sugar?! Are you nuts?! I am not kidding. These are one of my favorite cookies. Instead of using butter and sugar, I use dates and nuts, which are full of healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals!  You will never miss the oil and sugar with these!

And My Almond Joy Dessert Bars. These bars were inspired by the Almond Joy candy bar. The ingredients on the candy bar are practically just sugar, sugar, and some trans fats thrown into the mix. I decided to make a healthier version of it. It will sure to please.

Healthy can be Nutritious AND Delicious. J

Do you like cookies? Oh yah baby!

Do you like to bake? Is healthy a concern when baking? I love to bake, and when I bake, I make sure it is both delicious and good for you.

What is your favorite picture above? I really like the Bars.

xoxox,

Kathleen <3


Chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes : the recipe!

Thanks to you all for the positive response I got when I posted the picture of my chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes on Thursday. They are without doubt the best (cutest and most professional looking) cupcakes I’ve ever made – they even won me a prize!

They were also delicious – here’s how you make them! I originally saw the recipe for these cupcakes over at Annie’s Eats. My version below makes 12-16 cupcakes rather than the original 24, and also adds a couple of pretty vital instructions the original recipe leaves out.

The recipe is a slightly odd mixture of g and cups as I converted it from american, but it really is still very easy – just use the same size mug to measure out all the cup measures (or use a cup measure!) and you’ll be fine.

Here’s what you’ll need! Normally I would get put off my recipes with 3 different sets of ingredients – but don’t, they’re actually very easy to make.

For the cupcakes:

  • 170g  unsalted butter, at room temperature
  • just under 1 cups light brown sugar, packed
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1.3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 1 tsp. baking soda
  • half a cup milk
  • 2 tsp. vanilla extract
  • half cup chocolate chips

For the filling:

  • 2 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperatur
  • 3 tbsp. light brown sugar, packed
  • .5 cup plus 1 tbsp. all-purpose flour
  • 100g sweetened condensed milk
  • ½ tsp. vanilla extract
  • .5 cup cup mini semisweet chocolate chips

For the frosting:

  • 170g  unsalted butter, at room temperature
  • .3 cup light brown sugar, packed
  • 1.6 cups confectioners’ sugar
  • 0.5 cup all-purpose flour
  • pinch salt
  • 1.5 tbsp. milk
  • 2 tsp. vanilla extract

First, preheat the oven to around 160 degrees and then whiz up your very soft butter with your light brown sugar. A promising start!

I made the chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes with Emma as she made red velvet whoopie pies for her Cake Eaters Anonymous entry.

Next, add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each one with the mixer. At this stage, also add the vanilla extract and chocolate chips. When you add the chocolate chips, be sure to coat them in a couple of tablespoons of flour first (this ensures that they don’t sink to the bottom of the cupcake. Then, add the rest of the flour, baking powder and bicarb and milk. Beat well. I suspected that the batter was extremely delicious and I tested it to make sure – it was extremely delicious!

Slide the batter into your cupcake cases – filling no more than just over half high. I found that my version intended to make 12 cupcakes made more like 16 so you may have a few spare! Pop them into the oven, remembering to turn them at least once so they brown evenly, and start to test for doneness after around 15 minutes.

Next up, make the delicious cookie dough batter to go INSIDE your cupcakes! I know, what fun.

WARNING – this stuff is addictive and once you know how to make it, there’s no going back. First, combine the soft butter and sugar and then add the chocolate chips and condensed milk and vanilla.

Apply some of the mixture to face and then put into the fridge for a while to harden slightly.

At this point my cupcakes had finished cooking and were cooling on their racks. Once they are completely cool, its time to cut out their centres!

I must apologise about my terrible pictures from here on in – we lost the light :-(

Using a sharp knife, cut a cone shaped slice of cake out of the cupcake ready to receive the cookie dough. Eat the spare cake.

Then using a teaspoon, dollop as much cookie dough as will humanly fit into the cavity. Lovely. Smooth down with the teaspoon.

One last thing to do – make the frosting. This is a pretty standard frosting recipe but the addition of the brown sugar and chocolate chips sprinkled on top gives it a lovely cookie flavour. It also has flour in it which was a first for me, but you couldn’t tell from the taste of the finished frosting at all.

First, beat the butter and brown sugar before adding the icing sugar.

It goes everywhere. Oh well.

Next, add in the flour and a pinch of salt and then the milk and vanilla extract. At this point it will come together into a creamy loveliness.

Fill your piping bag with frosting and have at the cupcakes! I used the wilton 1m tip and was very pleased with how they looked.

Lovely! Once I’d finished piping them, we sprinkled chocolate chips and then a mini chocolate cookie (a mini maryland cookie to be exact which they sell in multipacks at the supermarket) to each one.

I learned a valuable lesson here – don’t add a mini cookie until the *second* you’re going to serve the cupcake as otherwise the cookie will go soggy.

Yum yum yum. Make these soon!!


Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes!

I asked you guys what I should bake for the August Cake Eaters Anonymous event and you voted for the chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes from over at Annie’s Eats!

So last night, I made them! With Emma’s help of course.

And they are the cutest thing ever!

And eating leftover cookie dough for breakfast is the best thing ever!

Step by step recipe coming on monday!


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