Chocolate Oat Biscuits

Chewy and full of chocolate, these are good biscuits.  I’ve made these lots of times but have only just managed to take pictures of them.  Details below.

• 150 g butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup plain flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 2 cups oats
• 100 – 150 g milk chocolate (choc chips, or roughly chopped)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Cream butter and both sugars until light and fluffy.  Add vanilla and egg and mix till well combined.  Mix in the flour and baking powder.  Add the oats and chocolate and mix through. Place tablespoon sized balls of dough on lined baking trays and bake for 12-15 minutes.  Cool on a wire rack.  The recipe suggests you can get 24 biscuits out of the mixture and I managed 21.

mmmmmm chocolate.....

Buttery lemon biscuits

Welcome to post number 100!  I’d like to think I had something exciting in store but alas, all I have is a recipe for delicious biscuits that I somehow failed to take photos of.  Not quite sure how I spaced out on that one but the biscuits have moved along to their final destination as a morning tea offering at work, so no chance of catching up with them. 

I found a recipe for lemon and poppyseed biscuits on Taste.com.  It looked pretty reasonable so I thought I’d try it out even though I didn’t have any usable poppyseeds.  The recipe worked quite well, and for once I managed to make the number of biscuits the recipe suggested the dough would produce.  Bits and pieces as follows.

• 150g butter
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• grated rind of one lemon
• juice of 1/3 lemon

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (160 for fan forced).  Cream butter and sugar, then add egg and mix well. Fold in flour and baking powder, when combined add grated rind and juice.  Roll dough into 30 small balls and place, with space between them, on lined baking trays.  Bake for 12-15 minutes until lightly browned.

My biscuits turned out fairly well, lemony and buttery with a slightly crunchy outer layer.  They didn’t spread out enough to look like the pictures on Taste.com but I think I had the oven turned up too hot.  I baked them at 180 degrees instead of 160 but they were still cooked through and buttery, crumbly inside.  They just looked more like bite sized cookies instead of larger biscuits.  Sprinkling some sugar on top of the dough before baking would have worked quite well too.

Apple and cinnamon muffins

I tried a new recipe for apple and cinnamon muffins the other day (the original is here).  The muffins turned out OK but they weren’t great.  Not sure what contributed to this, I might have over mixed the batter or maybe they just weren’t sweet enough but they were still alright to eat.   Anyway, here’s the recipe mostly given in the hope that someone else might try it too and get a better result. 

On second thought looking at the recipe, I might not have put in quite enough baking powder.  All my recipes are scrawled on scrap paper so the chance to misread it is possible.  It’s entirely likely I used one teaspoon as opposed to one tablespoon baking powder.  So I’m not going to write the recipe off just yet.

• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 2 tspn cinnamon
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• apples (I used a tin of pie apple chopped up)
• 125g melted butter – cooled
• 2 eggs – whisked
• 3/4 cup milk
• apple cinnamon crunchola muesli for topping

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar.  In another bowl combine butter, eggs and milk.  Add wet mixture to dry mixture.  When mixed through add chopped apples.  Divide into muffin pans and top with crunchy muesli.  The original recipe was meant to make twelve muffins but I made seventeen smaller ones.  Bake for twenty minutes, then cool on wire racks.

the finished product

Coffee and donut cupcakes

It’s like morning tea all rolled into one baked good.  Delicious and efficient.

More rainbow cupcakes

These ones aren’t so blindingly colourful as the last lot but they are quite cute.

Go on, you know you want to…

…take the geek test.  I’m a bit disappointed that I only scored 30% geek.  I blame my lack of programming skills and the fact I didn’t own a computer for most of the nineties.  It holds a girl back from really curtailing her social development in favour of time online.

And if you’re wondering why no food posts, well, baking is a boredom or hunger related exercise and I’ve spent the last few weekends actually doing interesting stuff.  The few good things I’ve cooked weren’t really photograph standard (not that my photos are great).  I figured the coconut and pineapple sago I cooked would indeed look like a big pale bowl of white gloop.  It did taste good though.  But that’s why no photos.

Quince and berry pastries

Having never cooked quince before I was at a bit of a loss deciding what to do with them once prepared.  I bought three decent sized quince at the markets and after the long winded process of peeling and chopping them, I began the long process of cooking them.  There are lots of different recipes on the internet detailing how to prepare quince so I settled on cooking them in 4 cups water, 1 cup sugar and a dash of vanilla and cinnamon.  I simmered them for approximately an hour and a half till they appeared to be done.

But what to do with a container of cooked quince?  So the first thing I used them for was to make some pastries with the puff pastry I bought the other day.  I added some berries because the quince on their own were quite sweet.

I baked them in the oven for about 35 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius and they turned out pretty well for a first attempt.

Snickerdoodles!

Possibly the silliest biscuit name ever.

They are, however, extremely delicious.  I made some the other night from a recipe I found in a Women’s Weekly cookbook.  They’re really easy to make and don’t involve any strange or hard to find ingredients.

• 250g butter
• 1 tspn vanilla
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 3/4 cups plain flour
• 1 tspn bicarbonate soda
• 1/2-1 tspn nutmeg
• cinnamon sugar for rolling dough in

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Cream butter, both sugars and vanilla together.  Add the eggs, one at a time making sure each is mixed in thoroughly. Add flour, bicarb soda and nutmeg and mix well.  The dough then needs o be rolled into balls (approx tbsn sized) and rolled in the cinnamon sugar.  If the dough is too soft, placing it in the fridge for a while before rolling can useful.  I cooked these for about 15 minutes and the recipes yielded 34 biscuits but you could probably get more if you made them a little smaller.

Blueberry and lemon cupcakes

I finally got back to baking items that were decent enough to be photographed by my little point and shoot.  This week’s outing was blueberry cupcakes with lemon icing.  I’ve made a similar recipe before and it is really easy.  The cupcakes are also delicious. 

To the recipe (which can found through the link) I added 125 g fresh blueberries.  I cooked them for twenty minutes. When they were completely cooled I iced them with a lemon icing made from 1 cup icing sugar and the juice of half a lemon – which was delicious.  This time my yield was sixteen reasonable sized cupcakes.  This cake recipe is definitely a keeper.

mmmmm delicious icing

Pear and nectarine crumble

I decided the best way to use up my excess of fruit was to chop it all up and make a crumble.  This one contains pears and white nectarines.  I used just under a kilo of pears (I forget which kind, they had green skin) and about four nectarines.  The crumble topping was made up of about 125 grams of butter, some caster sugar, plain flour, a few hand fulls of rolled oats and some chopped walnuts.  I didn’t follow a recipe because I figured I could only get it so wrong. I mixed it all up till it looked about right, added it on top of the fruit and baked it in the oven for about an hour at 180 degrees Celsius.

It didn’t turn out too badly, the top was nice and crunchy – the oats and walnuts were the best bit.  The pears cooked up lovely but the nectarines were a bit smushy and tasteless.  I’d definitely cook another crumble but I’d use firmer fruit like pears or apples and less butter in the topping.