Clandestine Choc Chips

It's strange how much a blog that was started as a means to jot down some mental meanderings on the path to pound-loss contains so many posts about cake. And biscuits. And cookies.

Actually, knowing myself as I do, it's not strange at all. In fact, it's more surprising that the post-to-cake ratio isn't higher than it already is.  

I've always said, life without cake is not life. Yes, I want to lose weight, YES, I AM LOSING WEIGHT, and I am doing it WITH cake in my life. No, not cake every day, but then I never had cake every day when I wasn't trying to lose weight, either. Moderation, and all that. But I know myself well enough that, like most people I know who try to ease themselves up on that healthy diet wagon, restricting something so much that it's 'not allowed' any more, is just asking for trouble. Ranging from slipping off the back for a quick whatever-it-is-you-can't-live-without, to blowing up the wagon and everything else in the surrounding area. With lots of swears and promises of flammen-werfers for the future.

Going gluten-free has both compounded the 'problem', and simplified it, in one fell wheat-less swoop. No more nipping out for a quick packet of bourbons. (To be honest, nipping out for a packet of biscuits has never really been my thing, but it'll do to illustrate my point, if I eventually arrive at it.) No more scanning refrigerated shelves at the end of the day to see what cream cakes have been reduced. (Don't you give me that side-eye - I know you've done the same!) This is marvellous for my hips, but disagreeable to my brain.

Instant glutened, sweet (usually) gratification is no longer an option, unless I'm willing to mortgage my soul. You can take the girl out of Scotland, and all that, but I'm blowed if I'm going to pay five quid (or the equivalent) for six wee chocolate chip cookies, just because they're gluten-free. Uh-uh. I can spend that money on enough raw ingredients for over a hundred cookies, should my particular needs take me in that direction. (Well, as long as I don't want to add chocolate chips. Rarer than fairy dust over here, and just as expensive.)  

As I've said before, I'm fond of a wee something with a cup of tea in the afternoon. Sometimes apple chips, sometimes a biscuit, something usually around 100 calories, to make sure I keep within my daily range. So this weeks' effort comes from sallysbakingaddiction.com: Flourless Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies.  

Yes, I'm aware that chocolate chips aren't mentioned in the title, but I merely followed the recipe. It is totally not my fault that there are stealth choc chips, but, like a proper artist, I felt I had to be true to the original idea.

90 grams of rolled oats

1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon of baking soda

1 large egg

250 grams of peanut butter

6 tablespoons of light brown sugar

90 grams of choc chips

Basically you mix the dry stuff together, the wet(ter) stuff together, then mix them all up, adding the choc chips last, for some reason. Hey, I never claimed to be anything other than what I am: an enthusiastic amateur! I got thirty squishy, gooey, nommy cookies out of this mixture, each around two inches in diameter, and about half an inch thick.

What is good is they both refrigerate, and freeze well, which is just as well or this whole gluten-free cookie-making thing would be somewhat detrimental to the old shifting weight thing. Just because you know what's in them, doesn't mean that they're necessarily any better for your hips, should you wish to snarfle them all down in one go...

Chocolate Cake For Dummies

"Nic made her first real cake from scratch yesterday. (There's never been any cause to learn before, really, because cake-eating is not a daily occurrence, or even weekly, but the GF thing happened and suddenly shop-bought cakes and mixes were out of the question, when they were in question at all.)

So. This fudgey chocolate cake was made. And she saw that it was good. And so did the others. (Fingerprints on the plate are testament to that - it was made for a friend's birthday and appears to have been a success!).

It is called (wait for it, wait for it) 'Chocolate Idiot Cake'. 'Nuff said...

(We are not, however, discussing the cake made before this one. Because it was a travesty to cake-dom, a shameful parody of spongey goodness, an embarrassment to everything baked that came before.)"

Of course, I'm not counting the times when I was wee where I 'helped' my Mum in the kitchen making sponges, Eve's Puddings, or Mrs Laidler's American Devil's Food Cake (and if I can find that recipe ever again, I'll give it everything I've got to turn it gluten-free), but apart from a failed attempt at baking in first year home-economics class (it may have even just been an apple crumble), everything else has been either shop-bought already, or made out of a packet. Don't judge. I chose to do woodwork and metalwork at school, and even though I say so myself, I turned a mean lathe.

So, I have to admit to being a little nervous making this cake. When I say the first effort was a travesty to cake-dom, I think I'm being unfair to travesties to cake-dom in general. Thankfully for the author, I can't remember what the recipe was, but it included a list of interchangeable flours. The author lied. You CANNOT change almond flour with coconut flour gram for gram. It is known. (Now it is known, anyway.) Coconut flour LOVES the liquid, so it does. That, coupled with the suggestion of using 3/4 of a cup of caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of water instead of half a cup of agave syrup, was just asking for Trouble. With a capital T.

I called it my Learning Cake.

I also called it other things. Unprintable things. It did, after the addition of a cup of water (I started to wing it after realising that coconut flour, cocoa, caster sugar and a tablespoon of water will not make anything remotely resembling cake batter) change consistency from cocoa-coconut dust to something that could be coaxed in to a cake tin, but in all my years of watching cakes being made on telly I've never seen something come out of the oven that drips water on to the cooling rack. A soggy bottom that would have made Paul Hollywood run for the hills. It was, once it had dried out a little, surprisingly edible, although I do admit to not really wanting to finish it all before it went mouldy. (Cake-making for one: you either need an enormous freezer for your amazing and delicious creations, or be enormously bad at baking so that you don't want to keep it for longer than necessary. There is another option, but that entails putting back every pound that I've lost over the last three years, and as much as I'm an advocate of Life Without Cake Is No Life™, a line has to be drawn somewhere...)

But the Chocolate Idiot Cake was a dream come true. Squidgey in the middle, with a chocolatey crust on the edges, even consistency throughout, rich, sumptuous, and meltalicious on the tongue.

I need to make another one to see if it freezes okay.  

For science.  

Pin The Fail On The Chunky (Choc Chip Cookie Recipes)

"Nic is considering finding another location to keep all her online workouts in one place, because Pinterest just isn't cutting it. There are too many brownie recipes, and cookie recipes, and cake recipes to trawl through, like an army assault course for her overwhelmed imagination, before she can even get near her own set of calorie-killing videos!

Man, serving two gods is really tough!"

I think I wasted half an hour suffering from Oo-Shiny Syndrome tonight before I remembered I was looking at my Pins to decide which Jessica Smith workout videos I was going to put myself through and not lose myself in a sea of savoury scone recipes. I was already in my gear, my yoga mats were on the floor (they help deaden any noise I make so I don't frighten the downstairs neighbours), and my music stand was ready to hold my darling Galaxy Tab that I use to play the videos. Worse, I didn't even get to MY Pins, I was stuck on the page that has Pins from people you know, Pins from people you don't know but have Pinterests in common, Pins from Pinterest itself suggesting things you might like. So many cookie recipes! And I don't think I'll ever find the end of the page that has an infinite variety of banana bread.

I need internet blinkers.

You Spin Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round

"Nic continues to exercise the hope that she works best with unorthodox weight-loss methods, after spending an hour hula-hooping her corporeal self to the spiritual delights of The Great British Bake Off!"

I'm loving this hooping lark! Okay, it's not real hooping in the almost gymnastic sense that you see on YouTube - I have neither the dimensions of room nor control of my limbs to allow any fancy-schmancy arm and leg and dancing about shenanigans, but I have just enough control of this rotating glass-breaker (yeah, RIP water glass, your brave sacrifice to the hooping arts will not be forgotten) to be able to squat a little, move from side to side a little, and shimmy a little while doing my best gyrating hips Elvis Presley impression.

I have no idea if I'm doing it right or not, but I finish feeling like I've worked hard, and I do manage to break into a decent sweat, so something is certainly happening body-wise. To what extent that has to do with the actual exercise, or the presence of Paul Hollywood on my TV screen I couldn't tell you. I appear to be developing a penchant for silver foxes, but in this case I don't know how much that has to do with the general scrumminess Mr Hollywood (which, to be fair, is considerable), or the amount of cake on screen.

Hey, this far into the game I have to take my inspiration wherever I can find it, and if it involves losing weight and baking (even in this most abstract of forms) I'm going to run with it. Or, you know, twirl around with it. The combination of cake and weight-loss is, after all, my modus operandi!