Spice Up Your Life

Apple sauce is ubiquitous in the Netherlands; a veritable staple of Dutch ‘cuisine'. There are a couple of types I see on supermarket shelves (although many different brands... shelves and shelves of the stuff, metres long, reaching from the floor to the ceiling) - the first being what I call the baby food apple sauce - pure mush - and the second being a more robust, chunky pulp-like consistency. Toddler, as opposed to baby food. I buy a jar from time to time, usually because it's on offer, and I like to pretend that I'd actually use it to cook with rather than end up just eating it from the jar with a big spoon. You will be unsurprised to learn that I have ended up eating it from a jar with a big spoon every time. Until now.

I had read somewhere, probably on Pinterest, that apple sauce could be used in baking as a replacement for something. Eggs. Or perhaps butter. To be honest, I have yet to find a recipe (although my search to date has only included cookies and cakes) that doesn't also include both eggs and butter along with the apple sauce, so I may need to open up my research a little wider. Perhaps to scones and pancakes...

But I did come across this little gem:

Applesauce Oatmeal Cookies from Six Sisters' Stuff

You need:

1 cup or 255g apple-sauce (Baby, not toddler version)

1 cup or 250g brown sugar (I used dark brown)

1 egg
½ cup or 120g butter, softened

2 cups or 244g GF flour

1 cup or 90g GF oatmeal

1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ground nutmeg

½ tsp ground cloves (I used 2 tsps of speculaas spices instead of the 3 different spices mentioned in the recipe, because the smell is just heavenly!)

1 cup or 175g chocolate chips (optional)

Excuse me, though - I need to recover from reading the parenthetical option of adding chocolate chips to the recipe. Optional choc chips: surely an oxymoron. :: looks at photo above :: Hmm, interesting. It appears the only moron here is me.

There are only 2 paragraphs to the directions. Or really, one paragraph and one sentence. I was so taken aback by this simplicity that I decided to preheat my oven to 190C (375F) right at the beginning when I was asked. Brevity moves us in mysterious ways.

You're asked to mix together the apple-sauce, the brown sugar, the butter and the egg. That's it. Mix together. No ‘use a marble bowl made from stone that can only be found in one rocky outcrop of the Andes'. No ‘using a wooden spoon that has been handled for no less than four generations of baking women in your family'. Which may possibly be why this happened:

I used a hand-mixer first, but El-Cheapo model that it is, it merely chopped the softened butter into teeny-tiny pieces, refusing to, you know, actually mix the ingredients together. Even my trusty wooden spoon (one generation old) wasn't capable of remedying the situation, so I just had to hope that somehow everything would come right when I added all the dry ingredients (excluding the choc chips). Or, at worst, the problem would be well hidden amongst the oats and flour.

What you can't see can't hurt you, right? The dough should be firm, we're told, so adding more flour may be an option if somehow your consistency is a little... off. After folding in the choc chips (notice it's written plain and simple in the directions. None of your namby-pamby ‘optional' here) you are invited to scoop heaping tablespoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet, and bake for 13 to 15 minutes until golden.

Let me say here that this mixture is thick and really keeps its form well. I mean really keeps its form... I made three sheet-worths of cookies. The first, as seen above, had your plain ol' spoonfuls dolloped onto the tray. They came out looking much the same shape as they went in. Cookie dollops. The second tray contained artful 'squished down by a fork' morsels, that also came out looking pretty much as they went in.

I was nearing the top of a not-so-steep learning curve by the third tray, and not only did I artfully squish the cookies with a fork, but also neatened them up a little around the edges. 

A little.

goldilocks cookies: dollops, squished, and just right

Just to let you know, this quantity of dough gives you a metric sh*t-ton of cookies. which is roughly three dozen cookies in layman's terms. They're not crunchy cookies by any means, perhaps the legacy of the apple-sauce? but they're tasty, moreish, and spice-alicious, for all that. 

This Site Uses Cookies

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.

Triple Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies from Nigella.com (And the Simply Nigella series)

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...

Fifty Shades Of Lemon

Whenever I take photos with the camera on my phone that include white surfaces or white objects, I'm reminded of a scene from ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring' where Vermeer asks Griet what colours she sees in the clouds outside. If he were to ask me what colours I saw in my photo of a white tea-towel, or the bright white enamelled cover of my table-top hob, I'd be hard pressed just to give Griet's first and simple answer. For I see pink, and purple, and green in my white, but not because I have an artists' eye, but because, really, I do see pink, and purple, and green. My lens appears to have such a hatred for white that it consistently replaces them with the palest of blush pinks in the middle, and an apple white to the edges over which the Dulux paint company circa 1985 would have cried with joy.

I say this not with any real purpose but to apologise for the lack of photographic consistency in my fake food-blogger posts. My tea-towels really are crisp and white, well, apart from the inevitable blue patterning (I'm a sucker for blue and white household goods - I'd be up to my eyeballs in Delftware if I could afford it) and my cooker top is scrubbed white on a daily... quite often. But until I'm in command of proper photographic equipment, I shall have to put up with pastel back-drops. And, unfortunately, dear reader, so shall you!

But to get back on message (apologies - I've been watching some re-runs of The West Wing) today, in our continuing adventures in Fake Food Blogging™, we are venturing away from the comfortable shores of chocolate bay and setting sail for climes of a more tart nature.

Yeah, okay, we're making lemon cookies. But not any lemon cookies. No. Today we are nicking a recipe from Gluten Free On A Shoestring and shall attempt to replicate their Gluten Free Lemon Meltaway Cookies without incurring the wrath from, or being slapped with a lawsuit by, the original recipe developer.

You need:

For the cookies:

210g or 1½ cups all purpose gluten free flour
77g or ⅔ cup icing (confectioner's) sugar
48g or ⅓ cup cornstarch
¾ tsp xanthan gum
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
168g or 12 tbs unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 egg white, at room temperature
2 tsps freshly-squeezed lemon juice (plus more as necessary)
granulated sugar for dipping

For the glaze:

115g or 1 cup icing (confectioner's) sugar
2 to 4 tsps freshly-squeezed lemon juice

Shockingly, I followed the first suggestion to pre-heat my oven to 175c (or 350f), because looking down the instructions, I saw no mention of a particular bugbear of mine: being instructed to pre-heat the oven only to leave it on, pre-heating, for three hours, or overnight, while the dough rises, the shortbread log sets, or the melted butter cookies cool down in the fridge so they have a fighting chance of keeping a cookie shape whilst baking. Seriously, whose oven takes more than five minutes to warm up nowadays?

Anyhoo, this soap box seems to be developing a groove through over-use...

Find yourself a large bowl and add the flour, icing sugar, cornstarch, xantham gum, baking powder and salt, and, as suggested by the recipe, whisk to combine well. I'm guessing the whisk adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the combination process, the subtleties of which I am woefully under-qualified to comprehend. Leaving sarcasm aside, you're then instructed to add the lemon zest and to give it a jolly good mix to make sure any clumps of lemony goodness have been broken up. I took a photo of this stage, expecting to see a bowl of white (pink, green, and purple) flour decorated with little specs of yellow, but of course the zest, in the jolly good mixing, just gets coated with flour and loses its colour-defining properties.

Yes, the little shreds of zesty goodness are in there, because yes, the lemon has actually been relieved of its zest although looks appear to be deceiving, and yes, I used a wooden spoon and not a whisk. If my cookies lack a little I don't know what, then I'll know who what to blame.

After making a well in the centre of the mix, you're invited to add the butter, egg white, and two teaspoons of lemon juice to the mix, but remembering that you need to mix to combine after each separate addition. I'm such a picky language... picker (yeah, obviously it's not a super-power) that I get a little bothered by being told to add a list of ingredients, and only after you've dumped the butter, egg-whites and lemon juice in the flour well you read that, by the way, they should be added individually. Yes, the author is presuming you read through the instructions before flying head-long into the complicated world of cookie-making, but sometimes a little heads-up before the list would be helpful, because I get the impression that if a whisk is preferred to a spoon for the mixing-up of the dry ingredients, then making sure all the other ingredients aren't dumped in together at the same time might probably be important, too. Just sayin'...

My thighs are getting a really good workout from all this stepping on and off soapboxes today.

After everything has been added, and mixed in the right order, the dough should appear thick and smooth. You'll probably need to give it a good knead to get it there, and you can add more lemon juice by the teaspoon if it's not holding together properly.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper onto which place balls of dough you've rolled into a round between the palms of your hand, making sure to leave enough space between the balls to you can press them flatter without turning your tray into one huge lemon cookie. (Not, I have to say, that that sounds like a horrendous consequence of too-close cookie spacing...)

I'm not going to go into the really clumsy instructions given about how to wet the tines of a fork, dip them in sugar, and press them into the dough to make a flattened cookie with a pretty, sugary pattern on top, and just show you a photo instead.

Place the cookie sheet in the oven and bake them until their edges are lightly golden brown and are firm to the touch. 12 minutes is suggested, but I kept them in for 14 as they were still a little pale. I left them to cool on the sheet, as instructed, then transferred them to a wire rack in preparation for icing.

Never underestimate the amount of icing sugar, or over-estimate the amount of lemon juice you will need. Never. Icing sugar looks so strong and powerful in powder form, but shrivels up into a tiny proportion of its former self when faced with its arch-enemy, liquid. Do not, repeat: do NOT scoff at the ratio of powder to liquid. Never presume that when the recipe says 2 to 4 teaspoons of lemon juice to 115 grams of icing sugar, that it's playing around, and really means, ach, just use the rest of the juice left in the lemon, because it would be such a waste to throw it out when there's at least another half-lemon's worth in there...

Don't do it. Don't fall for the icing sugar scam. Especially when what is called for is a thick (but pourable) paste, and not a thin transparent glaze. You will end up emptying an only-recently opened box of icing sugar, and your kitchen will be covered with a thin, sweet powder that gets everywhere because you're getting more irritated each time you have to add another metric sh*t-ton of powder to a mixture that's stubbornly staying closer in consistency to lemon juice than to anything even approaching a drizzle-worthy state.

I'm beginning to feel like I should be adding PSA to the beginning of all my Fake Food-Blogger™ posts...

But fret not, for in the end a workable consistency will eventually manifest itself and you'll be able to artfully drizzle delicate icing zig-zags over the cookies, just like you see them do on television. Don't worry if they end up looking like a toddler was having a tantrum and decided that flinging spoonfuls of icing around the kitchen was the make-a-mess mode du jour, because these gorgeous mouthfuls of lemony delight don't taste any the less scrumptious for having been decorated by a ham-fisted spoon-and-icing noob. Seriously. My amateur drizzling skills do not detract from the gorgeousness that are Lemon Meltaway Cookies! They're light, and yummy, and do indeed melt-away on the tongue!

I may be in the mood to take apart some dreadful instruction prose, but the author sure knows how to name a cookie!

Making A Mocha-ry

I found the almost-perfect cookie recipe online the other day.

At first I thought Pinterest was being slightly irreverent, for after showing me it's own interpretation of my wants and needs (gluten-free recipes, pimp-your-own-home-library ideas, and shoes that cost the equivalent of one month's rent) it displayed unto me a recipe for chocolate and coffee cookies. Chocolate and coffee. A perfect combination for the mostly-reformed chocaholic who can't live without her coffee. Little sparkly lights at the edge of my vision may have also been involved. Then came the zinger: fully-glutened chocolate and coffee cookies. Such cruelty.

But then, I reasoned with myself, I wasn't making a fancy cake where simply substituting wheat flour with GF flour would result in probable disaster, I was going to make cookies. For myself. No-one else need know if disaster ensued. So I decided to use my M&S All-Purpose Gluten Free Flour instead of the wheat flour used in the original recipe, and hang the consequences.

I'm nothing if not a self-enabler under the guise of Food Blogger To The Stars Few. 

Now, I have to admit to making some other changes in the recipe, too, mostly down to replacing the ingredients I didn't have with the ones I did have. With a little sprinkling of laziness, but hey, if I was meant to be a master baker I'm sure the Fates would have pointed me in the right direction well before now. And I'm pretty sure they like a laugh as much as the next person.

So my faithful few, if you've got this far then today we're attempting Espresso Chocolate Chip Cookies from Just A Taste. In the (un)Official Nic Revolutionary Edit of 2015™. Someone so needs to hire me as their spin doctor. I'd be awesome. I'd make everything sound a little cheesy, but I'd be awesome.

For approximately twenty five cookies you need:

3 ounces or 85g of unsweetened chocolate, chopped

2 cups or 350g of semisweet chocolate chips, divided

8 tbs or 115g of unsalted butter, diced

3 large eggs

1 cup + 2 tbs or 250g of sugar

2 tsp instant coffee granules

¾ cup or 105g all-purpose flour (gluten free)

⅓ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

My replacements and substitutions ingredients-wise were thus: I used 100g of dark chocolate (a bars-worth over here in Clogland), mostly because I only had 180 grams of chocolate chips in the cupboard and needed any extra chocolate I could find. A terrible, horrible oversight that, running out of choc chips, and one of which I promise will never happen again. The shame. The humiliation. The... well, shock. Especially as I brought back a huge stash from home the last time I was there, what with them being on average around a quarter of the price of the equivalent over here, and I have no idea where they've gone. Well, no, that's a lie, they've gone to that Great Food Processor in the Sky. It's just obviously set on ‘Turbo Mix'. :: coughs ::

I used 170 grams of white sugar and added light brown sugar to bring it up to 250, purely because I forgot to write ‘white sugar' on my black-board shopping list last week when I realised I was running perilously low.

I also added another teaspoon of coffee granules to the amount advised in the recipe, mostly because I actually wanted to taste coffee in the cookies. I've found in the past that adding a little coffee to a chocolate recipe gives a boost to the overall chocolate taste without actually adding a coffee taste, which is great if you're wanting a Real Chocolate Experience, but because I'm looking for more of a nicely-mixed mocha, I added a little more coffee.

So really, if you want to make exactly what I made, you need:

3½ ounces or 100g 70% dark chocolate, chopped
1 cup or 175g semisweet chocolate chips
8tbs or 115g unsalted butter, diced
2 large eggs (yeah, I forgot to buy those, too)
17/20 cup or 170g white sugar (hey, it's about time the US measurements had to work for a change...)
2/5 cup or 80g light brown sugar (ditto)
3 tsp instant coffee granules

¾ cup or 105g all-purpose flour (gluten free)

⅓ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

You're advised to pre-heat your oven to 350F or 175C, but I decided to wait. Not because I was worried that my poor old oven would be blasting away on stand-by for hours (as suggested by so many other recipes) but because the notes at the end of the recipe tell us that the batter will be much looser than the average cookie dough, no doubt because of the melted chocolate and butter, and I reckoned twenty minutes or so in the fridge before spooning them out to bake would lessen the chance of spread a bit. So I decided I'd put the oven on after placing the batter in the chilly depths of the refrigerator. 

You need to combine the chopped chocolate, the butter, and 1 cup of chocolate chips in a double boiler, and stir until they've melted. Or, if you're me, you'll combine the butter and chocolate (keeping the choc chips for a textural addition to the finished batter because you don't have enough to both melt and add for texture at the end) in a microwave bowl, and blitz it on high for thirty seconds at a time until it has melted.

Who would have thought such a sublime subject would be so difficult to capture by camera phone? Brown does not appear to be the most photogenic of colours when it comes to food.

Next it is suggested that you add a whisk attachment to your stand mixer and whisk the eggs, sugar and instant coffee granules on high speed until very thick, and the mixture forms a ribbon when the whisk is lifted, for about three minutes. Or ten minutes with a hand whisk and a lot of determination.

Then the fun part, although what's not fun about giving yourself neck-ache trying to simulate an electric whisk, (I feel like I'm turning into the Karl Pilkington of the fake food blogging world, and I'm not sure if that amuses or concerns me...) the fun part is slowly adding the melted chocolate to the egg and sugar mix, and whisking just until combined. The smell! THE SMELL, people. Oof. Now I'm really kicking myself for making these on a fast day. 

(It's not the first time I've conveniently misplaced the knowledge that I'm supposed to be on a food vacation day. My earliest attempt at making peanut butter banana bread fell on a fast day. No, actually, I'm well aware that it's a fast day, yet, incredibly, my brain likes to convince me that it's actually a clever idea to bake something that smells ridiculously tasty when I'm not actually allowed to eat it that day. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Brains are awesome but awful.

I'm talking about the 5:2 diet/lifestyle thing where I eat five hundred calories for two non-consecutive days per week. I've written about it already. I may write about it again at some point. It's not starvation, but it's five hundred calories to be consumed however you choose over one day, twice weekly. I usually choose some variety of home-made vegetable soup for lunch, and a massive pile of roast veggies for dinner. I don't feel full ever on these fast days (a potential oxymoron if I ever saw one), and although I'm not fit for company by the evening, I'm a great fan of the diet. The lifestyle. The whatever it is.)

So, after lamenting over the suspicion that your brain secretly hates you, you then need to turn off your stand mixer, or try to massage some life back into your dead arm, sift the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl and stir until just combined, then add the remaining (or only) cup of chocolate chips.

It's at this point I put the bowl of batter in the fridge to harden a little (and put the oven on to pre-heat), because, as promised in the notes, the batter was a lot looser than your average cookie dough, and I figured putting them in the (pre-heated) oven as they were would only result in one massive tray-shaped cookie*, instead of more portion-friendly cookie batches. Although to be honest, it would have looked prettier than the... well, the effort below. 

After ten to twelve minutes in the oven (or until the cookies are cracked on top, and a little puffy-looking) you can take them out, and let them cool a little on the tray before transferring them to a rack. I was happy to see my effort exceeded all expectations in the looks department.

I then took artè-fartè photos of said not-so-ugly cookies; some not-quite-in-focus close-ups of broken cookies, then put them all BROKEN COOKIES INCLUDED in a box in the fridge. My will-power received a hearty slap on the back.

Cookies for breakfast tomorrow, though...

The Day After Edit: Oh my stars. These are good. REALLY good. Just squidgey enough in the middle whilst retaining their slightly crisp cookie edge, and a heavenly mix of coffee and chocolate. If you change nothing else in the original recipe, I (racing) heartily suggest adding an extra teaspoon of instant coffee granules. Because. Om. mmtastymm

* In the spirit of honesty, I must admit that this option did indeed cross my mind.

Faith, Hope And Cookies

When I read a claim that promises whatever is being touted is the best, cheapest, healthiest, tastiest, or most perfect thing ever, I tend to scoff and move on, suspecting that they're get-rich-quick efforts from online sharks; the evangelistic opinion of one; or anything in between the two. What can I say? I have trust issues. Still, for some reason, cookies inhabit another part of my brain. A trusting part. A part that promises me comfort and revels in the sensory delights of baking. I know, I know. I shouldn't trust this part of my brain any more than those internet snake-oil salesmen, because, hello? Until someone invents a zero-calorie treat, every wondrous cookie claim should be taken with a pinch of baking soda. 

All the same, going recipe-hunting and coming across one whose very name would normally have me scrolling on if it was anything other than a cookie recipe, was a hook I couldn't ignore!

The Healthiest Cookies Ever is that hook. I mean, yeah, sure, “healthiest cookies ever". (Please note the irony quotes.) But cookies... It's a real scroll on/click link quandary.

Please. Of course I clicked. And liked. And printed out.

The recipe says the quantity of mix is for twelve cookies, but I made mine more bite-sized and got twenty-six, uh wait... :: looks at final cookie photo :: um, twenty-four cookies :: wipes crumbs from mouth :: in total.

You need:

1½ cups or approx 190g raw walnut halves

1 cup or approx 175g dates, pitted (I used fourteen whole dates)

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg (recommended flax egg if paleo or vegan)

½ cup or 190g dark chocolate chips (optional)

(I always snort when I see the word ‘optional' after ingredients such as chocolate chips. To me it's just as redundant as the ‘sharing' packs of Revels or M&Ms, or their added sticky closure so you can save more for later, as if the manufacturers truly believe you won't actually just scarf the whole bag down in one go. Bless.) 

It's quite a quick recipe this, doubly so for me this time, because I was going to use an electric implement. Oh yes! Well, actually, it's the last working pieces of an old hand-blender/electric whisk/mini processor that I bought a few years ago. I used the blender part to blitz my home-made soups, but because it was made of plastic, it didn't actually last very long. (Metal all the way, boys and girls, if you like your hand-blender to remain unwarped and working properly for more than six months...)

But I digress. Before I interrupted myself, I was explaining that this is actually quite a quick recipe, so I have no qualms in inviting you to preheat your ovens to 350f or 175c. (How many recipes have I done that say Turn On Your Oven, then tell you near the end that you need to set/proof/chill the dough for hours, forgetting that your oven has been on, toasty, and eagerly awaiting your raw cookies for an eternity already.)

So. Ovens on? Then we'll begin.

Firstly (or secondly if you're including turning on the oven...) line your baking sheets with parchment, and set them aside. 

In your glorified herb chopper (or food processor should you own one) whizz the dates and walnuts together until they form a crumbly mixture.

Then add in the salt, baking soda, vanilla extract, and egg (flax or otherwise) and whizz again until the batter is smoothish, then add in the choc chips, then give it a final quick whizz to distribute them evenly.

Bring your lined baking sheets back from whence they were banished, and spoon on the batter, using your hands to flatten the cookie dough. Actually, I used another spoon kept damp to avoid sticking to each cookie as I pressed it down. Not that you can tell...

Bake for twelve minutes, or until the edges are slightly golden, then keep them on the sheets to cool for ten minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

According to the author, you can store these up to a week in the fridge, or for a month or more in the freezer. They're really rather deliciously squishy and moreish, so more power to you if you feel that you won't be able to get through the cookies before they go off, and need to freeze them instead.

Me? Mine are already boxed up and in the fridge, safe away from grabby hands (mine) and will no doubt be enjoyably snarfled long before they have time to even think about being anything less than scrumptious! (But in a conscientious way of course... emptying the container in one day would turn these Healthiest Cookies Ever into an oxymoron!)

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Polenta?

I stocked my cupboards up with a load of things of which I'd either never heard, or had never used before, after I made my decision to try a gluten free elimination diet to see whether it was wheat that was causing me all sorts of bleh. An overzealous shopper on this occasion, my basket at the local health food shop was laden in record time. Laden probably due to panic, certainly intrigue, and possibly something to do with a bogof deal. Actually it was buy one get on half price, but bogohp isn't as fun to have on the page. But stock up I most certainly did, with:

Corn flour I'd heard of as a thickener, but it is apparently also something you can use to make cakes and muffins, or used in a mix with other flours. (Bear with me. Plain flour, self-raising, and wholemeal were pretty much all I was aware of up until this point, and now they were being thrown out of the equation, I realised I was standing at the bottom of a very steep learning curve.) 

Brown rice, white rice, and the ever-popular but illogical-sounding glutinous rice seemed interesting and not too scary. The ordinary rice flours seem to be a staple in a lot of baking recipes, and the sweet rice flour looks like it could be really good fun given the right recipe!

Buckwheat flour initially confused me because the uh, 'wheat' in the name, but research (aka Mr Wikipedia) told me that it is actually a relation of rhubarb (this world of ours is a strange, strange place) and not a wheat or grass at all! It's one of the flours I read that you can use instead of almond flour, which is excellent, considering you need to take out a second mortgage to be able to afford enough almond flour for anything more than a couple of cup-cakes. 

I'm exaggerating. But only just. Note: I didn't get any almond flour. At eight euros for a three hundred and fifty gram bag I'm as well just buying a couple of boxes of inordinately expensive GF choc chip cookies from the local supermarket.

Anyhoo, if you'll give me a second to climb down off my high horse, I'll continue...

Chickpeas (garbanzo beans,), although new to me in flour form are loved be me in bean form, and I presume they can be used in much the same way as buckwheat flour - they seem a very similar texture, but of course that might mean nothing until I've used the chickpea flour for myself, which I plan to do in some Indian recipes I found online.

Coconut flour was a no-brainer simply because I love coconut. I have since come to, if not appreciate, then be aware of its fickle and thirsty ways, and I appear to have amassed quite the stock-pile in my cupboard. (It was the main ingredient of my first ever cake. Not the Idiot Cake, but the Travesty To Cake-Dom. I have learned much since then.)

But polenta, or corn meal (coarsely ground as opposed to the finely milled corn flour). It was there beside all the other meals and flours looking for all intents and purposes like it belonged with them. It was gluten free, bogohp, and although I'd heard of it, and was positive it would be a positive addition to my GF stash, I just wasn't sure how that would come to pass. And stayed not sure.

So those two bags of polenta have just languished there in my cupboard since July, waiting for me to remember I had them. Waiting, in fact, for me to find a cheap Kindle book on Amazon by Mark David Abbott called 'Cookies: Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Refined Sugar Free' (not an affiliated link, nor have I anything to do with the author) in which I found some lovely sounding recipes, including Orange Polenta Cookies. Ding-Ding-Ding! 

Orange Polenta Cookies

160 grams polenta

55 grams brown rice flour

48 grams almond flour (I used buckwheat)

1 tsp GF baking powder

50 grams coconut oil

50 grams palm sugar (I used light brown sugar)

grated rind of 1 orange

1 tsp orange juice (I used a tbs, but that's because I was squeezing the thing by hand and it may or may not have gone everywhere...)

1 egg

(optional couple of handfuls of white choc chips - not part of the original recipe, but I fancied them and thought white choc and orange would go nicely. And because chocolate.)

Like most of the (albeit beginner) recipes I've tried before, you mixed all the dry stuff together, then all the wet stuff together, then chucked them all together (I am now suffering from semantic satiation. Together together together) to make a dough. The recipe suggested using a food processor. I laughed in the face of such presumption and whipped out my cheap, plastic bowl and trusty wooden spoon.

The dough then had to be covered in cling-film (I have yet to be convinced that anything involving cling-film can possibly be less than a three-man job; one to hold the box, one to gently pull the fragile plastic from the box to the length needed, and one to carefully coax a tear across the width without letting go of the edges while simultaneously fighting the wrap's inner compulsion to fold up on itself in an intricate and intimate manner. I went through two metres of the stuff just to have enough to work with), rolled it into a log and let to set in the fridge for half an hour.

But Behold! A wrapped and submissive slab of polenta dough, and included in the deal, a still-life of my trusty heart-shaped measuring... things, which are marvellous in our eyes.

After thirty minutes you then carved it up into slices and bunged it in a medium oven (180C) for ten minutes.

Final instructions were to leave them on the baking tray(s) until they were cool. 

The nomming part was self-evident.

I have to say the gentle warning about the texture wasn't needed, and in fact I'm reminded of a coarse shortbread. The orange gives a lovely tang, the white chocolate a hint of decadence, and the biscuit itself isn't quite as crumbly as I expected. I may not have waited until they were cool to sample one :: cough :: so that expectation was placed at an unnatural low anyway. But they passed the I Don't Know What To Do With This Weird Ingredient test with flying colours, so I feel a little more hopeful that polenta's future will be spent out in the light with the rest of the cool GF flours instead of stuck in the dark corner of my kitchen cupboard pining away, forgotten and misunderstood !

Food Blogging For Idiots

What can I say? I made biscuits again. Cookies. Shortbread. Ach, you know what I mean. I'm just thankful that up to now they've all stored well, because potentially they could be trouble makers in the old fat department.  

I have to admit I'm really enjoying this baking lark. It's like messing around with Play-Doh that you can eat. That you're supposed to eat, I mean. (Because really, who hasn't fallen for that vanilla-y goodness at one point or other in their childhood?) All this mixing and blending and rolling and kneading and actually, it's even better than Play-Doh, because I don't know about you, but I think I must have had a non-food version of brumotactillophobia (a fear of different foods touching on your plate) when it came to the different colours touching one another in play. There's probably a proper name for that, but I'm damned if I can find it. There's an answer for everything online, but you have to ask the right question first...

Now, though, everything gets mixed up together, and depending on what it's going to be, gets rolled out, or squished, or prodded or shoved into baking tins. I suspect all I've actually done here is confirm the fact that I'm just a big kid.

But today I'm going to pretend I'm one of those fancy food bloggers, because me and my little Samsung Galaxy S2 phone camera (yes, it's 2015, yes the S6 has been out for a while, but you know what? Take a look at my work space (which comprises of the lid of a table-top gas cooker, and my sink drainer) and baking tools (ranging from ancient, to second-hand, to cheap but cheerful), and you'll realise that getting the most modern phone with the zippiest tech is not the first thing on my list of life upgrades) me and my phone camera are going to pretend we're in the kitchen of Nigella or Ina, and it's really a fancy DSLR!

But first, I have to tell you what we're making! I'm failing in my duties as a food blogger already.
Tsk.

We're making Double Dark Chocolate Shortbread Cookies. Oh yes.

You need: 

120 grams of softened, unsalted butter

30 grams of icing sugar

30 grams of dark cocoa powder

1 teaspoon of vanilla essence

100 grams of (gluten-free) all-purpose flour

90 grams of dark chocolate chips  (I *may* have added a bit more, because chocolate)

Reading the recipe, the first instruction was to wang the oven on to 160C, but reading further, you had to refrigerate the dough for at least an hour. Uh-uh. My leccy bill ain't having any of your wasteful habits, madame authoress. None of them. My tiny little oven doesn't need such a grand introduction to the medium heat of 160 degrees Celsius.

So instead I went ahead and creamed the butter, cocoa powder and icing sugar together to get a smooth paste, then added the vanilla, following that with the flour, and finally the chocolate chips.

 Turning it on to a board (read: lid of the cooker) I prepared it to be rolled into a 'smooth 8" log'.

:: snerk ::  I am a child.

I added a little cocoa powder to the baking paper, just to be on the safe side, then wrapped the log, twisted the ends, rolled it out, and put it in the fridge for an hour.

Yes, that's Markie's cocoa powder. The cheapest per gram, if you can believe that, that I can find here. Seems ridiculous, and although I must admit to not knowing the contents of every shop in town as of yet, as baking supplies go, this country seems woefully behind the times.

Remembering to put the oven on (well done me :: pats back::) I brought out the log, and chopped it up into roughly 20 pieces. The advice is to use a sharp knife. I'd add to that and say watch out for the cold and solid choc chips, because no matter how sharp your knife is, it's going to deflect off a choc chip or four and do unspeakable things to the uniformity of the shortbread cookies. Just sayin'.

As you can see, I was left with one small piece, one extra small piece that would have ruined the beautiful layout of my two trays of cookies. It was tragic, but it had to go.

Go in my mouth.  

The recipe suggested a baking time of twelve to fifteen minutes, and I went for thirteen, because I could. The next time I'll go for a couple less; my tiny wee oven likes to be good at what it does occasionally, and the shortbread don't seem to be greedy when it comes to time and heat demands.

I remembered just in time not to attempt to remove them from the baking sheet when they came out of the oven - flashbacks to my Mum making shortbread at home, and always leaving them in the tray to 'set' and cool a little before attempting to put them on the racks.

And these babies are so melt-in-the-mouth it's not true! They're light and chocolatey and ridiculously moreish, and I was hard-pressed to stop at sampling one. Okay. Two. They're really good, even though I say so myself. I think a couple of minutes less both of the initial mixing, and in the oven, might have made them a little less crumbly, but on the whole the recipe does what it sets out to do - give you a pile of delicious, double dark chocolate shortbread cookies.