Category: Recipes

Favourite cookery complete with instructions

Mrs Fields, eat your dough out

Classic Toll House Chocolate Chip CookiesI’ve been munching on these for the last week, so I might as well share the pain. I’ve had that extra incentive to go to the gym, too. But it must be healthy – it’s got nuts in it!

When Kate came back from the States a couple of months back, she brought me a souvenir: an American-style biscuit (err.. cookie) cookbook called “Old Fashioned Cookies”. I’ve made a couple of things out of it now, and they’ve been fab. This recipe was just like those Mrs Fields cookies, and the book calls them “Classic Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies”.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking soda (not powder)
1 teaspoon of salt
250g softened butter
1/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup (firmly packed) brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
375g pack of dark chocolate buds (e.g. Nestle melts)
1 cup chopped walnuts

Method

Preheat oven to 190 celcius.

In a large bowl, mix together the butter, white sugar, brown sugar and vanilla until combined. Add eggs one at a time and stir them in. Sift the flour, baking soda and salt into the mixture and stir through.

Coarsely chop the chocolate buds and the nuts (if necessary). Mix into the dough.

Make balls of dough approximately one rounded tablespoon in size, and place on a tray lined with baking paper.

Cook for 9 minutes. Then remove and allow to cool slightly and set before moving them to a cooling rack.

Best eaten when still slightly warm, although should keep for several days after if stored in an airtight container.

The above is the recipe that I followed, although if I made them again, I would use more nuts (perhaps 1 1/2 cups) and slightly less baking soda (perhaps 3/4 teaspoon).

Easter French-toast Recipe

Well, Easter’s coming up this weekend, and everyone will be eating chocolate. But, before then is Good Friday – the day of the Hot Cross Bun. Once you’ve eaten your fill (and then some) of the buns, and a couple of days have past, the buns will be starting to go stale. Instead of throwing them out, recycle them in this recipe, as it will be many months (at least 8) before you see them on the supermarket shelves again. And, it’s a fantastic way to recover from too much chocolate (it’s healthy, it’s got fruit in it!)

Ingredients

3 or 4 slightly stale Hot Cross Buns
1 egg
1/2 cup of milk
Butter
Small amount of icing sugar (for decoration)
Maple syrup (for decoration)

Method

Slice the buns in half, so you have a “crossed” half and a plain half. Set aside for a second. Beat the egg and milk together until it’s fluffy and well-mixed. Heat a frypan on the stove, and start to melt the butter in it.

Place one of the sliced buns into the mixture. Wait no more than a minute, flip the halves over so that the other side soaks for a little. After it, too, has soaked a little, place the pieces into the frypan. Cook one side, flip, then cook the other. It doesn’t take very long.

Remove the french-toasted bun pieces and put on a plate. Dust with icing sugar and lightly drizzle with maple syrup. Serve!

Repeat the soaking-frying-dusting for each of the buns until you’re full (again) of bun, or have run out, and will need to wait until next Easter (or January, whatever comes first).

Banana Icecream Recipe

Now that banana prices have come down, it’s time to gorge on this fruit (err.. herb) that we’ve been denied so long. The prices aren’t back to reasonable levels, so some kind of special dish with intense banana flavour is needed. Here’s the perfect use for bananas as we come into warmer weather: icecream! It’s probably the world’s simplest icecream recipe, as well.

Ingredients

3 large, ripe bananas
300ml cream (thickened cream is fine)
395g can sweetened condensed milk (full fat – I haven’t tried skim)

Method

This recipe is tolerant to variations in amounts of ingredients, so don’t be worried if not exactly as above.

Break up the bananas and drop into a food processor, then blend into pulp. If using a blender instead, add the cream and tip the blender from side to side to ensure bananas get to the blades. Don’t over blend.

Add the remaining ingredients and mix together, then pour into a freezer-safe container, at least 1L in size.

Place in freezer for at least 4 hours.

Baklava Recipe

The other weekend I baked a few little things for an afternoon tea, and I was asked for the recipe I used to make the baklava. I like baklava, and having it made it now, I’d probably buy it rather than bake it, as it is a bit time-consuming. However, the satisfaction of having done it yourself does add something to the flavour. This recipe is a modified version of the one from Donna Hay’s excellent Modern Classics Book 2.

Ingredients

36 sheets of filo pastry (one 375g pack of Pampas filo is sufficient)
125g melted butter (for pastry)
3 tablespoons oil
1 – 1.5 cups chopped walnuts (100-150g of walnuts)
1.5 cups chopped almonds (150g – blanched is good but not required)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (for filling)
1/3 cup brown sugar
45g softened butter (for filling)
1 cup water
2 cups white sugar
0.5 teaspoon ground cinnamon (for syrup)
2 cloves

Method

Heat oven to 160 degrees celcius. Defrost the filo pastry. Grease a shallow, rectangular tray about 20cm by 30cm (don’t line with foil or baking paper).

Make filling by finely chopping and combining all the nuts with cinnamon, sugar and butter.

Combine butter and oil. Place a single sheet of filo into tray, and moisten with butter-oil using pasty brush. If a single sheet doesn’t fit, just tear the pastry to size, or even cover with multiple pieces of sheets so that whole tray is covered. Put another sheet down and moisten again. Build up 12 layers of sheets this way.

Spread half of the spiced nut mixture evenly across the pastry. Cover with another 12 layers of pastry, as before. Then spread the remaining half of mixture on top. Finish with the remaining 12 layers of pastry in the same way.

Cut the tray of baklava into diamonds – one set of cuts parallel to the sides, and another at an angle. Should make about 28 pieces. Put it into the oven, and bake for 1 hour. But don’t stop yet, there’s the syrup to make.

Put the sugar, water, cinnamon and cloves in a saucepan and cook over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Simmer for a further six minutes until it forms a syrup, and then remove from heat. Take the cloves out.

After the baklava is cooked, remove and let sit for five minutes or so, then pour the syrup over. It’s tasty warm, or if you’ve got self-control, wait about a day, and it will be even better.