Double Chocolate Cookies and baking lessons with friends.

Hey! again I've been away from the blog for a bit, busy baking for orders as well as carrying on making various incarnations of German friendship cake, It seemed for a while to be the cake that never ended as part of the sourdough mixture was passed between me and my mum for a while, and as tasty as all the different variations of cake I tried were (Pecan fudge was the favourite) I am kind of glad the bowl of sourdough is no longer cluttering up the worktop in my tiny kitchen.

I've also been away for a couple of days to the lovely Bath. The weather wasn't great but it's such a beautiful town and full of great restaurants and bakeries. They even have they're own bun, the Bath bun, it's sort of like a mix between brioche and a teacake and very yummy. There's also the Sally Lunn bun which is a very old recipe of a giant soft bread bun served in Sally Lunns house, the oldest house in Bath, here's the boyfriend with his Sally Lunn bun and some tea (he will kill me for posting this hehe)

Any way a couple of weeks ago my friends Chris and Jen popped round to my house just as I was taking a batch of Peanut butter cookies out of the oven (funny how well timed my friends visits can be) the cookies were enjoyed but Chris must have went home craving more as he asked if I would give him a cookie baking lesson. He hadn't baked a lot before and thought a lesson would be much more useful than simply following a recipe. So I sent him off to the shop with a list of ingredients ready for his first baking lesson.

We decided to make both the peanut butter cookies as well as double chocolate cookies. So we donned our aprons and got started.

The peanut butter ones turned out great as usual as this is a tried and tested recipe which can be found here.

The Double Chocolate recipe I had required a bit of tweaking but in the end they turned out great, soft in the middle and really rich with chocolate. Here's Chris looking all proud with himself with the first batch of Double Chocolate:

I forgot to take a picture of just the cookies as I was too busy eating all of them.

I got the recipe from the hummingbird bakery and the cookies were rich and gooey and very chocolaty but I found I had to add quite a bit more flour that they suggested as the dough was too runny to begin with.

Any way here's the recipe (with my amendments)

Double Chocolate Chip Cookies

Makes12

50g unsalted butter
450g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
2 eggs
170g soft light brown sugar or light muscovado sugar (Again I used a little more to balance out the extra flour)
¼ tsp vanilla extract
85g plain flour (I used more like double this )
½ tsp salt
½ tsp baking powder
Preheat the oven to 170°C/gas 3. Put the butter and half the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (do not let the base of the bowl touch the water). Leave until melted and smooth.
Put the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract in a bowl and beat until well mixed. Pour in the chocolate mixture, beating on slow speed until well combined.

Sift the flour, salt and baking powder into a separate bowl, then stir into the chocolate mixture in 3 additions, mixing well after each addition (scrape any unmixed ingredients from the side of the bowl with a rubber spatula). Finally, stir in the remaining chocolate until evenly dispersed.

Arrange 6 equal amounts of cookie dough on each prepared baking tray. Make sure that the cookies are spaced apart to allow for spreading while baking. Bake in the preheated oven for 10-15 minutes, checking regularly after 10 minutes. They are ready when the tops start to crack and look glossy. Leave the cookies to cool slightly on the trays before turning out onto a wire cooling rack to cool completely.

Again these turned out really tasty but be prepared to have to fiddle around with the mixture to get the right consistency.

That's all for today any way I have a lot of orders this coming week but I'm gonna try and bake a few new things as well

Bye for now

Cupcake Kris