Monday 25 February 2013

Chewy American style cookies

I’m a huge lover of cookies, but I’ve struggled to get that soft chewy American style cookie…well until now!

I'm now in love with this recipe, it has worked every time and is so easy.

I’ve gone a bit cookie crazy now and been experimenting with loads of different flavours. Below is the choc chip recipe further down are a few of the flavours I’ve experimented with.

Ingredients 
Makes 15
120g salted butter, at room temperature
75g light brown sugar
75g granulated sugar (use caster sugar)
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
240g plain flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
200g choc chips


1. Beat together the butter and sugars until fluffy – I use my lovely new Kenwood Kmix for this which was a bday present and I’m in love with it! Add the vanilla extract, then the egg, and beat in well (I add a spoonful of flour here as well to stop curdling).
2. Add the flour and bicarbonate of soda, then mix until combined to a dough. The mixture will be pretty solid making it hard to mix – that’s why using a stand mixer really helps – unless you want a great bingo wing workout!

3. Then add you choc chips (or other choice).
4. Preheat the oven to 180C. Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper. Shape mix into golf-ball sized balls and place on baking tray, spacing them well apart. Bake for about 13-15 minutes, until golden, but not browned.

5. ENJOY!

So my experiments -
 
I replaced the choc chips with a variety of different flavours.
 
 
White choc and toffee popcorn = 130g white choc, chopped up plus 70g toffee popcorn
 
 

Choc orange = 150g good quality dark orange chocolate chopped up (I used Sainsbury’s Swiss Fair-trade) and 30-50g of sugared orange segments again chopped up.
 
 

M&Ms – 200g of M&Ms!
 
 

For Easter I’ll be trying white choc and raspberry! Have you got any other cookie flavour ideas?