I will always be the first to let you know that cooking and I are not the closest of friends; au contraire, we are mere nodding acquaintances at best. The Fake Food Blogger™ in me does like to give things a go now and again, just to see whether my doing (there is no try, according to Yoda) has actually improved not just the finished product, but the actual creative process, too, practice making perfect, and all that.
That being said, my cooking and baking ‘research' to date hasn't really given me much in the way of empirical evidence pointing to any significant improvement, unless you count and compare my very first attempt at GF baking (an unmitigated disaster That Which Must Not Be Named) to my last effort - Lemon Meltaway Cookies (a triumph in the face of icing sugar adversity) - but I think it's fair to say that although my learning curve may still be a tad on the horizontal side, I will endeavour to keep trying doing.
For science.
The first thing I noticed about the recipe was that it was written in a charmingly vernacular style. Well, in the charming vernacular style of Nigella Lawson. You'll know by now that badly written anything grinds my gears, as Peter Griffin is wont to say, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it sounding in my head just as if Nigella herself was giving me her instructions. That in itself may be due to the script writer for her programme perhaps also being the person in charge of writing the prose for her website and books, a PR dream-come-true in respects to product management, or it might just be that Nigella is really like her on-screen persona and it's her dictation that becomes everything we hear and read. I'd quite like to think that if we were to partake of a glass of wine in her kitchen while she puttered about making something yummy, it would sound exactly like what we see on screen, be it TV or monitor. Then again, I might just be falling for yet another marketing ploy, but I'm happy to take a tumble in this instance!
So, you need:
150g dark chocolate chips
125g dark chocolate
125g buckwheat flour
25g cocoa (sieved)
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp salt
60g unsalted butter
125g soft dark brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla paste (or extract)
2 large eggs (fridge cold)
Your first instruction is to ‘clatter' the chocolate chips on a dish and place them in the fridge (on the assumption that the colder they are when finally added to the mixture, the more the chance they'll retain their semblance of chocolate chip-ness once baked.) Fair enough. I'm already sufficiently charmed by the language that I'd probably do anything she asked further down the recipe, whether it was cookie-related or not...
And because it wasn't the first thing she asked us to do, I was happy to pre-heat my wee oven to 180 degrees and line a couple of baking sheets with parchment paper. You can see how far under Nigella's spell I've already fallen... Or you can see how contrary I can be... Take your pick.
You're then asked to break up the chocolate bar into chunks and melt it either in the microwave, or in a bain-marie. I chose the former, and easier option.
Well, I say easier option, but it's not idiot-proof. A wee word of advice: don't presume that just because the first minute hasn't been sufficient to melt the chocolate, that a second won't set the whole thing on fire. That I'm speaking here from experience will only confirm my relationship with the cooking Gods. I pray I won't reduce my kitchen to ashes; they ignore my pleas. I'm beginning to suspect that they don't accept burnt offerings.
Once you've managed to fan most of the smoke out of the kitchen window, you can add the buckwheat flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt to a bowl, and give them a good mix, then in another bowl cream the sugar, butter, and vanilla extract together until it's ‘a caramel colour, and fluffy' whatever that means. Mine was not in any way whatsoever fluffy. It was creamed, but I suspect more in the sense of having been beaten up by a bully, than in any way baking related...
You then mix in the slightly cooled-down chocolate to the creamed sugar and butter, (or however much runny stuff you've managed to salvage from the fiery ball of chocolate hell) and then add the eggs one-by-one. Once everything is nicely combined, you can add the dry ingredients, finishing off by folding in the chilled chocolate chips.
You're then asked to ‘dollop' tablespoons of the dough onto the lined baking sheets (ah, she's talking my particular type of cooking language) although I made smaller cookies using heaped teaspoonfuls of the dough, because no matter how I try I can't just have one cookie, and making them smaller means that a) I'm not eating the same calories by partaking of a couple of mouthfuls of cookie bliss than I am if I were to pig-out out on two dinner-plate cookies, and b) technically they'll last longer because I get on average around thirty or so cookies per recipe. (I say
technically, but I really mean
in theory. What can I say, sometimes a girl needs a little cookie therapy.)
Once dolloped, bake them in the oven for nine to ten minutes, bringing them out when they are just getting set at the edges but still soft to the touch and looking undercooked elsewhere. (I reckon if you're wanting a more flat biscuit cookie than the soft squishy version of this recipe, you can add a minute or two to the baking time.)
Once they're out, you leave them on the baking sheet for another ten minutes before transferring them to a rack to finish cooling completely.
Then NOM, because these babies are squishy chocolatey heaven!
Nice one, Nigella! Your
Simply series may have been panned, but you still inspire the naughty cookie baker in all of us. Or at least me. Mmm, cookies...
