Reverse chocolate chip cookies

So I’ve just realised that I have a serious chocolate problem. One symptom: I believe I can “improve” every recipe by adding chocolate to it – well, every sweet recipe, anyway. And I’ve done it again!

These decadent little treats are a chocolate lover’s dream – a good dose of melted chocolate gleefully blended into a chewy cookie mixture, and plenty of white chocolate chips thrown in to give your teeth something exciting to hook into (and also provide a nicer visual than brown-on-brown).

My main piece of advice with chocolate chip cookies is to very carefully monitor the cooking time. Everyone’s oven works a little differently, so perhaps even do a few test runs of one or two cookies to find out what the ideal cooking time is in your oven. And it’s much better to take them out too early than leave them in too long. Who wants crunchy chocolate chips cookies? 

When you take them out of the oven, the cookies will be tall and puffy, and you might think they’re undercooked, but rest assured that they will collapse back into a normal cookie shape as they cool. Leave them to rest on the oven trays for a while, otherwise they will be far too floppy to transfer onto the wire racks.

Interesting fact: chocolate chip cookies were invented by a happy mistake! A cook named Ruth Wakefield was making cookies and, after running out of her usual ingredient (the exact ingredient varies depending on which version of this story you read), decided to use chopped up chocolate instead, thinking it would melt into the cookies as they cooked. Luckily, she was wrong, and so began the life of chocolate-chip cookies, which were initially named “toll house cookies” (after the name of Wakefield’s inn). It’s hard to believe this only happened about eighty years ago – can you imagine life without chocolate chip cookies?

Ingredients

120 g Nuttelex (see tips below for alternatives)

½ tsp vanilla extract

85 g brown sugar

85 g white sugar

½ large egg

190 g plain flour

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp cocoa powder

50 g dark chocolate Melts, roughly chopped

160 g white chocolate chips

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170°C and line baking trays with baking paper.
2. Melt the dark chocolate pieces in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, ensuring the bowl never touches the water. Stir occasionally until chocolate is melted and smooth.
3. Allow chocolate to cool while beating together Nuttelex, vanilla, sugars and egg with an electric mixer until light in colour and texture (see image below).
4. Scoop a cupful of the mixture into the melted dark chocolate and mix together with a spoon to bring down the temperature of the chocolate, before adding it to the rest of the mixture and mixing thoroughly until the colour is even.
5. Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder into a large bowl. Add half at a time to the mixture, mixing well after each.
6. Add white chocolate chips and mix lightly and briefly with the elective mixer or by hand.
7. Refrigerate 1 hour.
8. Roll mixture into 3 cm balls and place on the prepared baking trays approximately 3 cm apart from each other.
9. Bake cookies for 10 minutes. Cool on trays for about15 minutes or until cookies can be lifted across to wire racks without bending too much. Cool completely on wire racks.

Makes 25–30.

Step 3 – beat the mixture until it becomes light

Step 4 – add some of the mixture to the melted chocolate

Tips

• Nuttelex is a dairy-free table spread, which we used in my house while I was growing up. It’s an alternative to butter and margarine, and you can find it beside them in Australian supermarkets. I’ve also tried this recipe with unsalted butter and Meadow Lea (margarine), and they all work fine, but I love the Nuttelex ones best. Just use whatever you have in the fridge.
• If you don’t have white chocolate chips, it’s perfectly okay to simply chop up a white chocolate block, but make sure the pieces are the size of chocolate chips – because huge lumps of white chocolate don’t taste as nice in a cookie as huge chunks of real chocolate do.
• If you’re wondering why the ingredients list specifies half an egg, it’s because this recipe in its original form makes about 60 cookies from one egg. I crack one egg into a glass and whisk it well with a fork to combine the yolk and the white, then pour half of it into the mixture (very slowly and carefully or the entire egg will plop in all at once). I haven’t tried using an entire egg, but chances are it would work okay.
• When melting chocolate in a bowl over simmering water, be careful not to burn yourself on steam escaping from between the bowl and the saucepan - especially when you're stirring the chocolate. You can actually buy double-boilers to use for this exact kind of thing, but I haven't bothered yet.
• The mixture will be fine if left in the refrigerator for longer than an hour, but will become firmer the longer it’s in there.
• This recipe makes enough cookies to require three baking trays. Because I only have two, I put the cookie mixture back in the fridge while the first two trayfuls are cooking and cooling.

Honey jumbles

Here's a secret formula I learnt in my kitchen this week: sugar + spice + all things nice = honey jumbles.
Now, you could always save yourself the trouble and pick up a pack of honey jumbles at the supermarket, but it won't beat having that warm and gingery aroma wafting through your home, or that happy feeling you get when you open the oven and pull out a tray of golden, fresh honey jumbles.
You might be surprised to see that this recipe actually doesn't include any honey at all – the golden syrup provides the sweetness and colour. If  this contradiction bothers you, you could probably swap out the golden syrup and replace with honey and brown sugar (but I haven't tried that yet)... Or, indeed, you could simply start calling them "golden syrup jumbles". But I digress.
No matter what you call 'em, the only thing to do with these jumbles is slather them with icing, brew a pot of tea, and plonk yourself down on the sofa with a good book.

Ingredients

Sugar + spice (the jumbles)
100 g unsalted butter, chopped
250 ml golden sytrup
400 g plain flour
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp mixed spice
2 tsp ground ginger
Pinch cloves
3 Tbs milk

All things n(icing)
1 egg white
240 g sifted icing sugar
2–3 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp plain flour
Food colouring of your choice

Method

1. In a medium saucepan, heat butter and golden syrup until just boiling (when bubbles begin to break on the surface). Remove from heat and cool for 10 minutes.
2. In the meantime, sift the dry ingredients. Once the syrup mixture is cooled, stir in the dry ingredients and milk. Mix well, then cover the saucepan with cling wrap and leave to rest for 2 hours.
3. Preheat oven to 180°C and line two baking trays with baking paper. 
4. Turn out about a quarter of the mixture onto a very lightly floured board or bench. Roll into a long snake shape approximately 2.5 cm in diameter, then cut with a knife into 5–6 cm lengths and place onto baking trays. Repeat this step three times until all the mixture has been used.
5. Bake 10 minutes and cool on trays. When the jumbles are completely cold, spread icing over them with a knife.

Makes 16

All things n(icing)

1. Beat egg white in a cup with a fork until it's as frothy as you can get it.
2. Place half the quantity of icing sugar in a bowl and make a well in the centre . Tip the egg white into the well and mix thoroughly, starting from the inside and slowly working outwards to the edge of the bowl.
3. Add the remaining icing sugar, flour and 2 tsp of the lemon juice and mix thoroughly again.
4. Add up to 1 tsp extra lemon juice to get the mixture to the right consistency.
5. With a knife, spread the icing over half the quantity of honey jumbles.
6. Add a few drop of the food colouring of your choice to the icing sugar mixture and mix well again before spreading it over the remaining half of the honey jumbles.
7. Leave to set at room temperature.

Tips

• Don't flour the board/bench too much, or your honey jumbles will have flour stuck all over them – even after cooking. A very light sprinkle will do the trick.
• Don't worry about the cracks that appear in the top of the jumbles as they cook. That's just what happens. After you've iced the jumbles, no one will be able to tell the cracks are there.
• Be careful not to over-cook the jumbles! Ten minutes should be enough. Eleven minutes will probably cause burnt edges.
• What's the right consistency of icing? I had to try a few times to get the icing on my jumbles smooth and shiny, and I think it helps to have a frothy egg white, to mix the ingredients together very well, and add enough lemon juice so that the mixture is thin enough to slowly run off a knife. If it's staying in a clump on your knife, it's not thin enough, and you should add more lemon juice. But be careful not to go too thin, because then the icing will trickle off the jumbles. Also remember that the food colouring will thin out the mixture even further.

Choc-dipped Anzac biscuits

Mmmm… Easter is only a week away! And as you Australians would have noticed, this year’s Anzac Day falls on the same weekend – resulting in five days off work for most of us. I decided to celebrate the occasion with Anzac bikkies… dipped in chocolate.

Ingredients

75 g rolled oats

120 g self-raising flour

90 g caster sugar
90 g brown sugar

50 g shredded (or desiccated) coconut

100 g unsalted butter (chopped)

1½ Tbs golden syrup

1½ Tbs boiling water

1 tsp bi-carbonate of soda

250 g chocolate (chopped)

2½ tsp olive oil

Method

1.       Preheat oven to 150°C and line baking trays with baking paper

2.       Roughly combine oats, flour, sugars and coconut in a bowl

3.       Melt butter with the golden syrup and water in a saucepan over medium heat

4.       Remove from heat and whisk in the bi-carbonate of soda

5.       Pour the syrup mixture over the dry ingredients and mix together with a wooden spoon

6.       Form tablespoonsful of mixture into balls and place on the baking trays 4 cm apart

7.       Bake for 12 minutes, then cool on trays for approximately five minutes (to enable biscuits to harden) before transferring to racks to cool completely

8.       Place chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water until melted, then stir chocolate until smooth. Remove from heat and stir in oil.

9.       Dip each biscuit into the chocolate mixture, then leave to set on wire racks or cold plates covered with baking paper.

Makes 30

Tips

• Anzac biscuits spread much more than normal biscuits during cooking, so take care to use only a tablespoonful of mixture for each biscuit and place them the full 4 cm apart on the trays.