Last Weekend's Cooking & Baking - Gooey Choc Chip Cookie Recipe

Hope everyone is having a good week and I'm sure you'll all agree with me that I'm glad to see the back of Storm Imogen. It's a beautiful day here today; clear blue skies and sunshine, just a little chilly breeze too. It's definitely getting lighter in the evenings now too so I can't wait to be able to take Barry on longer evening walks around the fields again rather than having to stick to the village with a torch.

Last weekend I had a good tidy up in my kitchen cupboards. It was a job I'd written on my list of "to do this year" jobs and so I'm impressed I've managed to do it so early on into this year. I'd bought a few little plastic baskets to make it easier to store things in the cupboards, particularly my baking cupboard which is full of sprinkles, flours, sugars and all sorts of sweet delights. While the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it with everything balancing on the sides, I also decided to bake something while all the baking bits were out and the easiest thing to make was going to be choc chip cookies as I seemed to have quite a collection of chocolate!

I've probably mentioned before but I don't really have much of a sweet tooth but do enjoy making sweet things for other people. I do however really enjoy these cookies even if I only manage to eat one compared with Jack who could polish two or three off in one sitting! These cookies are so easy to make, the recipe can be adapted to include anything you prefer (smarties cookies, white chocolate and raspberry are lovely etc.) and they take minutes to cook. I'm not a fan of crumbly cookies, I much prefer the gooey type and so this is how these turn out.

Ingredients:
125g butter, softened
100g light brown soft sugar
125g caster sugar
1 egg, beaten
1tsp vanilla extract
225g self raising flour
1/2tsp salt
200g chocolate chunks (or chips)

Method:
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
Cream the butter and both sugars together until fluffy and then gradually mix in the egg and vanilla. Add the flour and salt to the mixture, followed by the chocolate chunks. Give this a good mix until it becomes a dough, then use your hands to great a big ball of cookie dough.

Create smaller balls from the dough, about the size of a walnut and sit on a greased baking tray a sensible distance from each other to ensure the cookies have room to spread as they bake.
Pop in the middle of the oven for just 7 minutes before removing from the oven. I use a spatula to finish flattening the cookies before transferring them onto another tray or rack for cooling. Be careful if using a wire rack as the cookies aren't quite cooked and so can sink through the rack!
You'll find the cookies are crisp and golden on the outside but have that gooey chewy texture in the middle, yum!
They certainly go down very well in our house!

I thought I'd include a photo of my now organised baking cupboard; one of anyway because I seem to have so many baking bits and bobs!

Nice and tidy once more

 

I also cooked us a nice meal of beef fillet steak; it's the first time I'd cooked fillet steak. It's probably my least favourite cut of steak; it's tender but in my opinion there are far more flavoursome cuts, sirloin being my favourite because I love the fatty bit too! I did however cook these well considering it was my first time and I did them with a red wine and balsamic reduction which tasted lovely. This is one of my New Years Resolutions; to cook at least one different dinner each month following a recipe in the many food cookbooks and magazines I have! I'm actually doing quite well this month because tonight I'm cooking a smoky sausage casserole following a recipe in the most recent Good Food Magazine, looks tasty so we will wait and see...

 

Lovely beef fillet from the local Griffins Butchers in Newbury

 

 

Now that you're all drooling at the thought of cookies and steak, I feel like I've got my own back on all the amazing photos I've seen of pancakes so far today which have been making me very hungry! :-)

 

Em x