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.

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.

Spicy pear cookies

Although my baking has slowed a bit recently, I had some pears that I needed to do something with.  I thought, maybe a cake, or a fruit crumble?  But then I found this recipe for spicy pear cookies on AllRecipes.  I haven’t used up all the excess fruit I currently have but it’s a good start (and it gave me something to do the walnuts I inexplicably bought not long ago).  I have omitted the raisins from the original recipe because I don’t like them and they are gross. I put it down to eating too many of those tiny packs of sultanas as a child, I just don’t like the taste now.  It could also be that I don’t like really sweet things unless they’re made almost entirely of refined sugar – who knows?

Here’s the recipe:

• 115 g softened butter
• 1 and half cups brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tspn vanilla essence
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 and half tspns baking powder
• 1 tspn ground cinnamon
• 1 tspn ground ginger
• 1 pear – peeled, cored and diced
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 175 degrees Celsius.  In bowl cream butter and sugar, mix in egg and vanilla when well combined.  Add flour, baking powder, cinnamon and ginger to batter and mix well.  Stir in pears and walnuts.  On lined baking tray place tbspn sized rounded balls of dough.  Bake for 15-20 minutes.  This mixture gave me just under 30 cookies of reasonable size.

Raw dough is kind of gross too (but it has potential - unlike sultanas)

Fifteen minutes will get you a soft chewy cookie, but they might not come off the baking paper in one piece.  I cooked mine for twenty and they were crunchy at the edges and chewy in the middle.  These cookies are very tasty but if I were to make them again (and I might considering the number of pears I have) I would leave out a half cup of sugar (it makes the cookies delicious but I’m concerned the lovely taste is mostly sugar and not the spices I added).  I would also put in maybe another half cup of walnuts because they taste good and pears have quite a mild flavour.

Potential achieved!

The cookies are good though – I’d eaten four before I got them into their airtight plastic container