Chocolate chip cookies, Er, I mean, flapjacks

This weekend marks Mothering Sunday, a day to celebrate all mums with a name that helps avoid the whole apostrophe debate that plagues me on the second Sunday in May.

And it also hopefully underlines something else - the end of my exams. On Thursday, I sat what was what I greatly wish to be my last ACCA exam, a test that consisted of three and a quarter hours scribbling about advanced taxation. It was basically a test of how many financial loopholes you can discover for rich people that are completely legal, with only 5 points out of 100 dealing with the ethics of such scenarios. In the revision kit the marker states many students miss out on these ethics points entirely, simply skipping that section of the long question - doesn't exactly fill me with confidence about the profession.

With all that behind me, I now have hopefully a bit more time to devote to other pursuits, such as blogging and baking (Michael has kind of taken over the cooking lately). With us in charge of cakes after mass this week, I thought I'd put out a wee note to the mums to say that they'd get a free sweet treat if they came along on Sunday, and then I set to work.

Last night I made a lemon drizzle cake, which sank in the middle. Not quite so much so as to be reclassified as lemon pudding, but that was certainly its intent.

So then I made a carrot cake, only in the middle of measuring the flour, I had to go deal with a certain child who wouldn't wear their trainers (they were soaked from hockey practice), who didn't want to wear school shoes (it was still raining and girls' school shoes are terribly impractical in that respect for Scotland), who refused to wear wellies (she would look stupid, apparently), and who was having trouble squeezing her foot into a silver converse, as it was pinching her pinkie toe.

That problem dealt with, I added more flour and was pretty sure, but not entirely sure, that I put in a cup too much flour. So the carrot cake is substandard. Cream cheese icing will make it all better. Lots of it.

After those two mishaps I thought: I know - choc oat chip cookies! They always turn out perfectly, and it's so easy to just throw all the things into the food processor!

So I was weighing out the oats and was fairly sure that there was more in the bowl than the scales were telling me, but there was another child crying about the fact that he didn't get as much jam as his sister so I didn't double check the measurement. The work surface wasn't exactly immaculate, so I believe some particle had wedged itself under one of the feet of my digital scales, throwing all accuracy to the wind. And then I put all the ingredients in the food processor, to which the machine said: "No. Get this s*** out of me" in its special loud way.

Sure enough, the mixture was crumbly and not at all cookie dough-like. Not quite sure how to fix it to get it back to what it should be, but also not willing to waste these ingredients that still tasted fairly good together, I put it into a big tray and pressed it down, in the hopes of making some cookie bars of sorts. After 20 or so minutes in the oven, my experiment emerged looking like this:

The tray came out smelling good, and the kids came into the room shouting - "oooh!!! Flapjacks!!!"

Flapjacks, American readers, mean chewy oat bars here, usually bound with golden syrup. They do not mean pancakes.

So yeah, I guess I made flapjacks for tomorrow. When in doubt, drizzle over more chocolate.

I had planned to make hot cross buns, too, but I don't think I could handle those failing on me.

In summary, baking this weekend has been much like motherhood - I knew exactly what I had to do as a mum until I had kids. Plans change, and the result is nothing like what you thought it would be, but you learn to improvise and make the best of it. Now I just need that written on a soft focus photo of a mother looking adoringly at her children...

Happy Mothering Sunday.

Don't ask me for the recipes. 

ANZAC biscuits

ANZAC biscuits? What are those? I get asked this whenever I make these. Admittedly, it has been just a little shy of a decade since I last made a batch, but I did used to make them fairly frequently. The story I've been told is that these were the cookies sent over to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during the war, as they were simple and travelled well.

They are meant to be brittle, worthy of breaking a tooth, but I prefer them chewy. I messed up and didn't make them that way this time, but if you are in America and can get good coconut, these can be truly divine. They look deceptively boring, just appearing to be a plain oatmeal cookie, but when you bite in you get a hit of coconut and you realise just how more-ish these can be.

Another good thing about them is that you don't use any eggs, so no salmonella worries with the dough. Not that this has ever stopped me from eating raw cookie dough.

Oh, and one last tip: when adding sugar, don't mistake a jar of bulgar wheat for a jar of demerara sugar. Trust me on this.

Ahem.

One other nice thing about this recipe is that everything gets thrown into a bowl and mixed together at once. So here we have brown sugar, flour, baking soda, coconut, oats, and a dollop of golden syrup.

Then on went some melted butter.

Then it was mixed.

Err, it seemed a bit dry. So then I actually looked at the recipe and realized I was meant to add a couple tablespoons of water. That made it better.

Then it was rolled into sizeable balls and put in to bake. I can only really fit two trays in my oven at a time, so I crowded them in closer together than perhaps I should have in order to save time.

They flattened out, and I also realized I had overbaked them. Oops.

Not perfect shapes, to be sure. Nevertheless, I brought them to the playground after school and quickly found myself surrounded by children willing to eat them and thus take them off my hands (and a few parents too, of course).

I might try making them into bars next time, as I think that might help prevent overbaking and would also take less oven space. But here is the recipe for them as out of my Mrs Beeton cookbook (and why these are in a "Mrs Beeton" cookbook when she wrote her recipes prior to the war is a question for the publishers at Marks and Spencer):

Ingredients:

75g rolled oats

100g plain flour

150g sugar (I use brown sugar)

50g coconut

100g melted butter

1Tbsp golden sryup

1 1/2 tsp bicarb of soda

2 Tbsp water

Method:

Preheat oven to 160C. Line two baking sheets. 

Combine ingredients and mix well, then roll into balls and place on sheets. Bake for at least 10 min, more if needed but make sure you don't overbake. 

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Ugh. It has just been a lacklustre week, I'm afraid. No one thing in particular, just a general build-up of bleurgh and hmph, topped with meh, with not nearly enough silly animal videos appearing on my Facebook news feed.

At least there's always www.cakewrecks.com ...

And cookies. But only if you make them yourself.

Often when I am wandering the aisles of my local supermarket, my eye is caught by little brown bags near the tills. Each contains 5 cookies, and they are usually on sale for just £1. Most of the time, I manage to stop myself from buying the bags by simply saying to myself if I really want cookies I should spend the time and effort making them myself. The flip side of this, of course, is that I then don't have just five cookies, I have LOTS AND LOTS OF COOKIES!!!

My general favourite cookie is a classic oatmeal raisin cookie. I guess this is mainly because it is so hard to go wrong with them - the oats pretty much guarantee they will be chewy, and they make you feel you are somehow being wholesome by eating them, what with all those whole grain oats and dried fruit. Of course, that is all a lie, as you'll know as soon as you start to make them (news flash: cookies are never healthy) but I like to pretend.

Last time I made these I used dark muscovado sugar and they were pretty darned good. This time, I only had dark brown sugar (yes, they are different - the former is less processed so still retains some of the goodness of molasses) and they were good, just not as good.

I thought I'd try using my food processor to mix the cookies. I started with the brown sugar and butter.

So yeah, the food processor didn't work so well on this one. I was kind of annoyed as it meant another bowl to wash, but it just wasn't working, even with the butter at room temperature for once. In a bowl was just fine - thankfully the baby had fallen asleep so I had use of both hands, always a plus.

Then in went some caster sugar, two eggs, and some vanilla.

Until it was a gloopy, happy mixture.

In my scales' measuring bowl I put flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Both my children asked, when trying the cookies, "is that cinnamon I taste?" It was.

I made sure to mix all those dry ingredients together to distribute all the spices and raising agents before adding it to the big mix. No one wants a spice free cookie. NO ONE.

Then all that got mixed up.

And then last but not least, in went my oats and raisins. The bigger the better for your rolled oats here, but quick oats will work fine too. And sultanas instead of raisins are satisfactory. Any dried fruit, really. One of my friends once just used one big measurement of muesli instead of mixing oats and raisins and said they were the best oatmeal cookies she'd ever made, so there's that idea too.

The final mix. Sad to think that our kids will never get to make mix tapes for their friends and/or romantic interests.

Then I used two spoons to plop lumps of the mixture onto lined trays.

My daughter regularly asked me if I was done with the spoons yet.

Then after 8 minutes in the oven, out they came. I like them to look brown at the edges and just slightly underdone in the middle, as they will cook a bit more as they cool. Muscovado sugar also helps prevent them drying better than dark brown sugar does.

Nestled in their tin. Looks like I've got more than five...now who wants a cookie? Don't they look good for you?

Oatmeal Cookies - adapted from Joy of Cooking

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups plain flour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 cup butter 
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup raisins
• 3 1/2 cups rolled whole oats

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F/180C.
2. Mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg into a mixing bowl and set aside.
3. Mix butter and brown sugar. Add caster sugar, vanilla, and eggs and mix until well blended.
4. Sift (yes, again!) flour mixture into butter mixture and mix well.
5. Fold in raisins (or chocolate chips or chocolate covered raisins) and oats.
6. Spoon 1.5 inch balls onto non-stick cookie sheet.
7. Bake at 350°F for 6-9 minutes, rotating half way through baking. They will look slightly underdone in the middle but brown at the edges and will continue cooking while they cool.

Slow Cooker Porridge with Apples

So winter has arrived, I think we all can agree. Time for soups, stews, and the favourite of all three bears: porridge. Or "oatmeal" if you are in America somewhere.

I love a good bowl of porridge, but the measuring and cooking are just too much for me to tackle on a school morning, particularly since no one else in my household seems to like eating oatmeal at the moment. When I microwave it, I inevitably flood the dish no matter how high-sided a bowl I choose, and when I cook it on the stove I get a superior product, but the porridge always cooks faster than my favourite topping: apples. I lack the patience to stew them in advance, so they always end up with too much bite left in them. So usually I just settle for muesli mixed with yogurt, as it is quick and has oats too.

But everything has changed now, because at Christmas we were given a new toy: a slow cooker. Yes, everyone I know has raved about them for years, but fearing the clutter one would add to my kitchen, I never felt strongly enough to go and purchase one myself. So I was joyful indeed when the wrapping paper was pulled back to reveal one of these babies on Christmas day. Now I could finally start pinning slow-cooker recipes I would never actually try!

A recipe I had spotted a while back was for steel cut (or "pinhead") oats and apples cooked overnight to make a luxurious porridge. I didn't have any steel cut oats, nor could I find any in my local shops after a quick look around, but I did have rolled oats in my cupboard. I decided these would do, and got together a few things last night:

I still had these cooking apples left from a friend's tree, so I decided to use them for the most flavour. Into the bottom of the slow cooker they went. I was kind of excited about using huge chunks of apple and knowing they would be cooked until they were gorgeously soft.

Then I sprinkled some cinnamon on top.

Then went some brown sugar. I used around 1/4 cup, but could easily have done with less, as there was a lot of sweetness in the apples.

Then on went the rolled oats and a wee bit of salt.

Then a cup of water and a cup of milk.

I switched on the slow cooker to "low" and hoped for the best as I went off to read some Diana Wynne Jones before turning in for the night. So it was just before 10pm when I switched the crock pot on, and around 7am when I returned to its side.

When I first opened the lid in the morning, I panicked. It looked brown and burnt, and was bubbling in a ferocious manner at the edge. In my disappointed state, I took a disappointing photo.

But then I scooped some of it out. Wow. It was amazing. Kind of like a breakfast apple crumble. The top was oaty and chewy, but the apples at the bottom were moist and tender, with normal porridge sandwiched in the middle. Breakfast bliss, I tell you.

So if you do have a slow cooker gathering dust in a corner, I highly recommend you start your mornings this way. I certainly will be doing so again in the future.

Slow Cooker Apple Porridge

2 apples, chopped & peeled (though you don't have to peel them if you aren't up to it last thing at night)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2-4 Tbsp brown sugar
1 cup rolled oats
1/8 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 cup water

Layer ingredients in slow cooker in order listed. Turn on slow cooker to "low" just before you hit the hay and enjoy your winter feast in the morning!