Cookies and Cheese Bread

Originally posted on April 3, 2009

After a hard morning studying radioactive half lives (my life is sooooooooo glamourous !!) I needed to bake !!

Mickey made a batch of Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies – the nearest thing we’ve found to Millie’s Cookies which are absolute cookie heaven. One thing that I find makes cookie baking so much easier is to use the re-usable baking paper to line the baking sheets with. It only cost me about £4 for 4 huge sheets which I cut to size, and I’ve never, ever had one thing stick on them. Fabulous.

Ingredients

3 oz butter
3 oz granulated sugar
3 oz brown sugar
Few drops vanilla essence
1 beaten egg
6 oz self-raising flour, sifted
A pinch of salt
2 oz nuts, chopped (optional)
2 – 4 oz chocolate chips

Method

1: Pre-heat oven to 350 F/ Gas Mark 4/ 180 C
2: Stick some greaseproof paper on two baking trays
3: Cream the butter with sugars and vanilla essence in a bowl until pale and fluffy
4: Beat the egg in
5: Fold in the sifted flour and salt
6: Add the nuts and chocolate in then mix it all round with your spoon
7: Drop spoonfuls of mixture onto baking trays, allowing room for cookies to spread whilst baking
8: Pop trays in the oven for 11 minutes AND NOT A MINUTE LONGER, ELSE THEY’LL BE CRUNCHY BISCUITS
9: Cool your cookies on the trays for about a minute, before placing them onto a wire rack to cool down properly.

I then made, for the first time, a Cheese Bread recipe from Rachel Allen’s ‘Bake’. OK, it was supposed to be Cheese and Bacon but considering that I made it in that mad hour while tea was also being prepared, I think I’m allowed to leave out one of the ingredients.




The bread was gorgeous. Really easy to make it’s a batter type bread rather than a dough. Fair enough – I’ll definitely add the bacon lardons next time for a bit extra taste and texture but I’m more than happy with the loaf as it turned out. Dave will be enjoying some today for lunch, as sandwiches filled with york ham, sliced vine tomatoes and mustard. Lucky man !!!!!