Thursday, June 4, 2009

Baking by Baked


Friday night is usually a pretty quiet night for us. We always have a drink at work, so by the time I get home I don’t usually feel like making something for dinner – usually it’s take aways and TV. Last Friday night was the same, but I really felt like baking something and I hadn’t made cookies for ages, so I got out Baked, a recipe book I bought after seeing it reviewed on Peabody’s blog and made these peanut butter and milk chocolate chunk cookies.

The cookie recipes in Baked seem to have an awful lot of eggs in them. Some of the recipes have 5 eggs to 240g butter which would make the dough far too sloppy to work with I would imagine. This particular recipe had only 2 eggs for a 240g butter recipe. I halved the recipe and also scaled the eggs back to one egg yolk rather than a whole egg. I prefer my cookies to be a bit robust and I think it is the eggs that give a flat cookie.

The recipe called for milk chocolate. The book said that milk chocolate is the perfect combination with peanut butter – and they are right! These were probably the nicest peanut butter and chocolate cookie I have tasted. I would definitely make these again. My half batch made about 16 large cookies and they were all gone by Saturday afternoon.

Dinner last night was pork schnitzel pan fried with sage leaves and chopped olives. I served it with a roast vegetable salad – roast red peppers, kumara and pumpkin tossed with home made dukkah and cooked green beans and drizzled with a dressing made with blended natural yoghurt, lemon juice and feta. The recipe was an adaptation of a recipe from Dish magazine and was so delicious!

Peanut butter and Milk Chocolate Chunk Cookies (adapted from Baked)

120g butter
½ c each castor sugar and dark brown sugar
½ c peanut butter
1 egg yolk
½ tsp vanilla
1 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
100g milk chocolate, cut into chunks

• Cream butter and sugars, add peanut butter and then egg yolk and vanilla
• Stir in flour and baking soda, then chocolate
• Roll into large balls and flatten slightly
• Bake at 180c for 14 minutes- they will still be a bit soft but will harden as they cool

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a keen but not reliable baker as my efforts can have hit and miss results,so I really like the tips you include in your posts.I didn't realise that I could change amounts such as sugar and eggs or that too many eggs are the cause of flat cookies,so thanks for that Tammy.Oh,and your kitchen looks great,hope we will see more photos.

Anonymous said...

Those cookies look amazing. Yes, some of the recipes call for 8 eggs and lots of butter. Those I tend to cut in half.

Di said...

Those sound good. I agree with them--I prefer milk chocolate with my peanut butter--like anything Reeses. =) I'll have to keep these in mind, though I don't make peanut butter cookies much.