Sunday, 9 June 2013

Week 14 – If You Can’t Stand the Heat…

Chocolate Truffle Cookies

The sun is still shining here in south Wales.  Shining hard, it’s been hot all week!  My poor pasty skin can’t handle it.  So I can’t stand the heat, but I won’t get out of the kitchen!  Although I didn’t want to spend too much time in the kitchen, so that I could enjoy the nice weather.  As much as you can enjoy it while plastering yourself with SPF 50.  So a super simple recipe this week – the method only takes up half a page in the book!  For those of you that don’t have the book, if you look at the cover on Amazon, or any other retailer, these cookies are in the jar on the top left of the cover.  Don’t they look like chocolate biscotti?!
The Bake

As I just mentioned, this bake is simples!  The only area I strayed from ingredients-wise was the alcohol.  That’s right, they’re alcoholic cookies!  The recipe asks for amaretto, however the only thing similar I could find in my own alcohol stash was a small bottle of liqueur called ‘nutcracker’ that I’d been given a couple of Christmases ago.  But it would have to do, as an alcohol that I assume has nuts in, from its title.
The first step is to combine the dry ingredients, so flour, cocoa and baking powder, and sugar, then rub in the butter until it’s a sandy consistency.  You can’t really get a sandy colour with cocoa powder in the mix, so I basically rubbed the ingredients together until the butter was properly incorporated.  The egg and alcohol is mixed separately in a jug, before adding to the bowl, and mixing.  The recipe says that although it might seem dry at first, it will come together after proper mixing.  And they were right!

Too right if anything, I felt my mixture was a bit too wet, even after chilling in the fridge for half an hour.  This opinion was vindicated when it came to forming the individual cookies, coating them in icing sugar and putting them on a baking tray.  It was difficult to get them into a round shape, and to not get bits of dough stuck in the bowl of icing sugar.  It was a messy conveyor belt, let me tell you.  However in the end I made around 22 little dough balls, before putting them into the oven for 12 minutes.
They look quite nifty, although it’s a shame I couldn’t get them in a more uniform ball-shape.  Now, as I said above, these biscuits look like biscotti to me, and as they contained amaretto (or were meant to), I thought they’d taste like biscotti.  So imagine my surprise when they were soft!  When it comes to large cookies, I do prefer soft and squigy-ness, however I think as they’re quite small it would’ve been better to be crunchy.  However they are truffle cookies, and you don’t tend to get crunchy truffles… You can’t really taste the alcohol, or nut, but it does add a bit of another taste dimension.  They taste good with a cup of coffee anyway, and as they’re so small it’s fine to take two!
Next week will be a Father’s Day special, but until then, happy baking!

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