Week 5 - Cookies!

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies

This week I was back to looking through Home Sweet Home to find the first thing that popped out at me.  The book is divided into 7 chapters – Cupcakes; Cakes, Cheesecakes and Roulades; Cookies and Biscuits; Pies and Cobblers; Traybakes; Sweet Treats & Classic Puds; and Savouries.  I’ve cooked cupcakes and cakes, and the shortbreads I made in week 1 do come under the Cookies and Biscuits section, however the cookies were calling out to me.  Cookies seem simple enough, but I’ve had a few occasions where I haven’t spaced them far enough apart, and they’ve merged into one mega-cookie while cooking. So when I landed on the Peanut Butter & Chocolate Cookies recipe, I thought jackpot!  I still don’t have a rolling pin so the draw of this recipe was that as well as sounding delicious, it doesn’t require rolling out the cookie dough, you just roll the dough into balls by hand.  There’s a similar method in the Cake Days book for Snickerdoodles, which I highly recommend trying/baking, although they’re really moreish.  But back to this bake…

 

The Bake

The recipe doesn’t require anything too complicated this week, so I haven’t changed any of the quantities/ingredients.  Once again I learnt that I should really read the entire recipe before beginning, as the first instruction was to sieve the dry ingredients, so I added them all to the scales, however the recipe then tells you to cream the butter, peanut butter and sugar in a bowl.  How was I meant to measure out the butter, peanut butter and sugars when the scales bowl was in use?!  So I niftily put a plastic container on top of the weighing scales, and had to do some mental arithmetic.  Once the mixture was creamed, I added the egg (I also added the vanilla extract at this point, however I noticed that the recipe doesn’t say when to do this), mixed, then slowly added the dry ingredients.  The mixture at this point was way too dry to carry on using the hand mixer, so I moved to a wooden spoon.  The mixture was looking too dry full stop to be honest, so I added a little bit of water.  I then took little balls of the dough, rolled them in caster sugar, and laid them out evenly on a lined baking tray:

And after 15 minutes in the oven, they were done!  Simples.  However, little confession, I actually burnt the first set that went in the oven!  When I’m preheating the oven I tend to turn it right up in the hope it’ll heat to my desired temperature more quickly, however I forgot to turn it down once I’d put the cookies in!  Rookie error.  So the first batch are quite hard, but the second batch taste really good.  They were a bit hard too in my opinion, but I do like my cookies quite soft.  So really I should’ve taken them out earlier.  But chocolate and peanut butter is definitely a good taste combination.  They also look like cow pats in the picture, but that’s the lighting.  Probably.   Notice how I made sure a burnt one is in the picture rather than underneath?  So that you can see that we all make baking mistakes…

 

Now as you know I normally don’t reveal the chosen bake until the blog itself, mostly as I don’t tend to decide until the day I’m baking it, however I can exclusively reveal that next week I intend to make the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake!  When I was in the supermarket getting the ingredients for the cookies, they had a Pineapple Reduced to Clear for 40p (from £1.78!).  So as long as it is still edible next Thursday, that’s what I’ll be making.  Until then, Happy Baking!