Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Cookies & recipe

I decided to make cookies tonight. I started with my usual recipe mix for peanut butter, pecan and chocolate chip cookies but added a twist of red, green, yellow glazed cherries. Wait, that's not all. At my last batch of dough, I added the green tea that I got from Japan earlier this year. This is a mix of green tea leaves and green tea powder. I understand that much from the picture on the packaging. Please feel correct me if I'm wrong.
It's an experiment, a gamble if you like.The result is a different aroma in the air. There's definitely an infusion of green tea and how well does the marriage of peanut butter, pecan nuts, dark chocolate and green tea go? Let me put it this way, I thought that the peanut butter would overwhelm the green tea, but instead both distinct tastes blend into each other. I think I'll get some green tea powder the next time I do grocery shopping to experiment further.

Midnight Bakery Cookie
(Peanut butter, pecan & chocolate chip)

Ingredients
  • 100g unsalted butter at room temperature
  • 50g peanut butter
  • 280g brown sugar
  • 2 eggs (whole eggs)
  • 100g flour
  • 100g pecan (more if you like, I've used 200g of nuts before and they were great)
  • 100g chocolate chips (or just chop blocked chocolate. Likewise... use the whole 250g block if you like)
Direction
  1. Cream the butter, peanut butter and sugar until light and fluffy. If your butter is too hard to mix... well, serves you right not to follow my direction properly. You can melt the butter slightly by microwaving it for 10 seconds. I recommend doing this step by hand (no machine) not because I'm cruel (ok, so I am a little), but because it's a great arm exercise.
  2. Add the egg, one by one, mixing well at each addition.
  3. (Optional) You could add in a tablespoon of vanilla essence or I recommend Franjelico liqueur, but keep this out if you're baking for friends whose religion forbids the consumption of alcohol.. not that the alcohol would stick around during baking but it's the principle that matters.
  4. Sift the flour into the butter mixture and mix it.
  5. Add pecan and chocolate chips and just make sure they're distributed evenly.
  6. Use 2 spoons to roll cookie dough into balls and position them apart on the tray. Use teaspoons if you like your cookies small or tablespoons if you want giant size cookies, but make sure the opening of your cookie jar is big enough to fit the giant ones before you start getting excited about making super-sized cookies.
  7. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degree Celsius.
  8. Watch as they bake in the oven. The cookie dough balls should melt a little to resemble disks but you should start worrying if the whole thing just melt. This had happened to me twice using a craptastic oven that didn't reach the intended temperature. I didn't really time my baking, so just watch it until you think it looks like those that you get at your favourite cafe.
I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who tried this recipe. Happy baking and good luck! (^.^)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I've tried~~~ ^0^ smells so good with the peanut butter and eggs... will bring in tomorrow~~ ;)