Wednesday, March 4, 2009

New Favourite Cookies


These cookies are called Mexican peanut cookies – I have no idea why! This is another recipe I clipped from the newspaper some time ago. I made them for the subbies on our building site. They are delicious, easy to whip up and great to have in the tins.

They have interesting flavours – espresso powder, cinnamon and salted peanuts. As I have mentioned before, I am not a coffee drinker at all, but I don’t mind coffee flavoured cookies. Actually, one of my signature recipes which I havent blogged about yet, is espresso shortbread – one day you will hear all about that! The hint of cinnamon goes really well with the coffee flavour of these cookies – the coffee isn’t over whelming. The salted peanuts are great too. When I first put salted peanuts into baking I thought that they would be too salty, but they are just perfect. These cookies have the texture of a chocolate chip cookie made with condensed milk , which I love. I can tell already that these are going to become a family favourite!



Yesterday I wrote about the fresh snapper we got given, so I thought I would write about what I did with it. I ended up pan frying it, dusted with seasoned flour (in my opinion, the best way to cook fresh fish), and made a mango salsa to go with it. The salsa was simply chopped mango, chopped coriander and some oyster sauce – I cant say I loved the oyster sauce flavour. I think sweet chilli sauce would have been a better combination. To go with the fish I made a lovely salad of baby spinach, orange segments, toasted hazelnuts and baked feta. I treated the feta a little like haloumi, but instead of pan frying it, I drizzled it with oil and baked it at 200c for about 12 minutes or until it started to brown on the edges. This makes the feta deliciously chewy and almost a bit nutty flavoured. It works really well with the hazelnuts in the salad. I made a very simple vinaigrette from sherry vinegar and good olive oil using a 1:2 ratio. The salad was prefect with the fish!

Mexican Peanut Cookies

200g butter
200g brown sugar
4 tsp espresso powder
2 tsp cinnamon
300g self raising flour
200g salted peanuts

· Cream the butter and sugar, then stir in dry ingredients and lastly the chopped peanuts
· Roll into balls and flatten with a fork
· Bake at 180c for 15 minutes or until golden. Cool on a rack

3 comments:

Cakelaw said...

I am lovin' the cookies and the mango salsa - both look terrific!

Snooky doodle said...

these cookies look so yummy. I d like a couple of these :)

Elyse said...

Not only do these cookies look great, but I just love the flavor combination. The sounds absolutely wonderful!