Joy the Baker is a legend. Her eponymous website is an inspiration and her recipes always work. I had a hankering to make some bickies the other day and her site was my first port of call. She wrote about these lovely brown sugar cookies last September and said she found the recipe in Epicure. Continue reading
I may have mentioned that chocolate orange is my favourite sweet flavour combination. Maybe I was just thinking it. Either way, whenever I see a choc orange recipe I am all over it. These are lovely and so moreish – you will eat many. This is adapted from Simply Recipes. Continue reading
I adore Donna Hay. I love her magazine, her homewares, her style, her gorgeous store, everything. I’ve been lucky enough to meet her a few times and begged her for a job [no luck there, unfortunately]. I have every edition of her magazines and the vast majority of her cookbooks. All get a workout in my kitchen and her recipes are versatile, simple and usually no fuss.
For my mum’s birthday recently she decreed a ‘no gifts’ policy. The exception was anything home made. With this in mind I set about making her some gingerbread bickies. Mum adores gingerbread and I knew she’d love these.
The recipe is from Donna Hay Magazine issue 6. I use it every year to make gingerbread men at Christmas and it always turns out beautifully.
I dressed the biscuits up with dark chocolate glaze, another Donna Hay recipe, this time from the Simple Essentials – Chocolate book.
GATHER:
125g softened diced butter
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup golden syrup
2 ½ cups self-raising flour
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
LET’S GET TO IT:
Preheat oven to 190C, line two baking trays with baking paper.
Place butter and sugar in bowl of electric mixer and beat until light and creamy then add golden syrup.
Add sifted flour, ginger and bicarb soda and stir to combine.
Knead lighty on a floured benchtop to form a smooth dough.
Roll dough between two sheets of non-stick paper until 5mm thick. Use cookie cutter to cut out shapes.
Bake for 8 or so minutes/until golden.
Cool on trays.
When totally cold decorate with choc glaze.
CHOCOLATE GLAZE:
Melt 150g best quality dark chocolate with ½ cup pouring cream in a small pan over low heat, stirring until melted and smooth. Stand for 20 minutes to thicken. Then dunk the biscuits in the melted, gooey mix. Yum.
I keep a container of this in the fridge as it can be used to top a big cake, cupcakes, sandwich biscuits together, heated to pour over ice cream or eaten by the spoonful.
Being Australian we call small, sweet baked morsels biscuits. From my extensive blog reading I see that Americans call these items cookies. Let’s chalk it up to cultural differences.
In any case Misses 4 & 6 helped make umpteen of these sprinkle-covered biscuits for their little friends for Easter. It is the recipe I posted on my blog titled Child’s play: super simple sprinkle biscuits even a 4-year-old can make.
All you ned to do is gently push a paddlepop stick into the biscuit prior to baking. Ta da! A bickie on a stick – and as everyone knows, sticks make food taste better.
There is no getting away from the fact that these biscuits are not what you call pretty. They aren’t even plain – they are lock-them-away-in-the-tower unattractive and they aren’t the type of sweet treat you’d see in upmarket eateries. But, if you squint or close your eyes as you take a bite you will understand that they are everything that a biscuit should be: sweet, chocolate-y, satisfying. So let’s remember that old cliche of looks not being important, shall we? This recipe is from Australian Good Taste but as usual, I tweaked it…
GATHER:
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup caster sugar
150g cubed butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cup self raising flour
1 egg
150g good chocolate [they use chopped up choc, I grabbed buttons and they worked fine]
2 tablespoons sifted cocoa powder
Dash best vanilla extract [if you only have vanilla essence – skip it! That stuff is evil and a poor imitation].
LET’S GET TO IT:
Preheat oven to 170C and line two large trays with baking powder.
Place both sugars, vanilla and butter in bowl of electric mixer and beat until creamy and changed colour.
Beat in the egg until combined then add flour and cocoa. Keep beating until everything is combined.
Stir in chocolate using a spoon.
Shape into golf ball size blobs and gently flatten.
Bake 12-ish minutes [you may need a fw more minutes depending on your oven].
Cool on wire racks.
It was baking o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Cruising the blogs for inspiration I was stunted by indecison – so much home-baked goodness to choose from. How to decide?
Seeing Veggie Mama’s [veggiemama.com] droolworthy recipe for raspberry & white chocolate cookies cinched it – we had raspberries, we had white choc chips – we had a winner.
This is easy enough to whip up while referring the quibbles of the under-six set, who by the way, inhaled these and happily polished off the remainder of the frozen berries. So helpful. I make fairy incy bickies as I am of the opinion that it is better to have several small rather than one large [especially in the realm of baked goods/ dark choc bars/glass of chardonnay…]. I did reduce the amount of brown sugar by a quarter of a cup for those who are keeping score…
GATHER:
125 g butter at room temp, diced
1/2 cup caster sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg at room temp
2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
dash of vanilla extract
3/4 cup-ish white choc chips
frozen raspberries
LET’S DO IT:
Preheat oven to 170-ish C and line 2 baking trays with baking paper.
Cream sugars and butter until fluffy and a pretty light sand colour.
Add egg and vanilla and continue beating [it may look ugly here but it will all even out].
Using a metal spoon stir in combined flour & baking powder until combined, then add around half the white choc chips.
Roll into a ball around the size of a wlanut and flatten gently. Decorate with raspberries and more choc bits.
Bake 12-ish minustes until they are lightly golden and remove to baking trays to cool.
Watch kidlets inhale.
So, it has been pouring here for what seems like weeks but is actually only two days. Perfect baking day – to the recipe archive! Homemade Monte Carlos it is and away we go. I hadn’t tried this recipe before and boy was I in for a shock – two of the ingredients weren’t mentioned in the instructions, leaving me to guess where they should be added. These bickies were such a disappointment that I didn’t end up using all the mixture. Once stuck together with luscious berry jam and whipped thickened cream they were a hit with the in-house, under six years food tasters but I won’t be using this recipe again in a hurry.
I had intended to share the recipe here but I wouldn’t want to inflict it on you.
Instead, here’s a pic of the finished product:
Monte Carlos sandwiched with fresh cream & jam
Have you ever had a big baking disappointment?
the hungry mum 