Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Cadbury Double Chocolate Chip Biscuits

I like my biscuits crisp and crunchy. When I made the "Worlds Best Chocolate Chip Cookie" the other day (substituting MMs for the chocolate chips) I was greatly dissapointed in the cake like cookie I produced. However, according to wikipedia, a cookie is a small, flat slightly raised cake, so I shouldn't have been surprised. A biscuit is defined as a hard, crisp, baked product. Therefore I am calling todays recipe a Double Chocolate Chip Biscuit.

I doubled the recipe to make a decent amount and it ended up making about 57, allowing for the usually taste tests of the uncooked mixture. The ingredients were basic enough, I had then all in my pantry, except that I substituted the choc chips for broken up pieces of a dark chocolate (which is a bit more melty in nature than cooking choc chips). After mixing all the ingredients together into a well formed soft dough-like mixture and spooning it onto oven trays, I cooked trays of the biscuit for varying lengths of time before allowing the biscuits to cool on the tray. In my oven, biscuits cooked for the nominated 15 minutes were crisp on the outside but chewy inside, while another 10 minutes drying out in the oven created a crunchy biscuits more akin to what I am used to from commercial packets of chocolate biscuits.

In my opinion, this biscuit would work well as a plain chocolate biscuit without the choc chips, or you could add whatever you fancy to spice it up a bit.

Ingredients: Regular
Method: Easy
Rating: 4.5 Stars

Ingredients
125g butter
1 cup brown sugar
¾ cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 egg
1½ cups self raising flour
½ cup Cocoa
¾ cup Dark Chocolate Chips

Method
  1. Preheat oven to 160ÂșC.
  2. Cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy.
  3. Mix in vanilla essence and egg.
  4. Stir in flour and Cocoa Powder.
  5. Add Dark Chocolate Chips.
  6. Place teaspoons of mixture on greased baking tray and bake in moderate oven for 10-15 minutes.

Recipe Adapted From: The Cadbury Kitchen

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding

I  doubled the recipe and cooked it in a deep single dish. The oven I was using was an old electric oven with a Fahrenheit scale, and the good word was that it was a slow cooker at the best of times, so I cranked it to the 450 deg setting. When putting the pudding together the sauce was poured over the top of the batter using the back of a spoon to gently break the flow over the batter. I only used about half of the doubled sauce mixture as I felt that there may have been too much given I was using a very deep dish and not the 4 separate smaller dishes.

Liam at home20091227_02 I lost track of cooking time, but removed the pudding from the oven when the top was very firm to touch. I was a little concerned that it might not have been cooked but I didn’t want it to burn.

The first scoop from the corner looked delicious, but the sauce at the bottom was scarce…my fault I know…and moments latter some uncooked batter came oozing out of the centre of the pudding. Luckily there wasn’t a lot and perhaps an extra 5 or 10 minutes in the oven would have cooked it right through.

Served with a scoop of icecream, there were no complaints from the many who devoured this little gem. I will have to make it again soon to try and produce a more perfect pudding, with more sauce and cooked through. 

Liam at home20091227_03 The problem I have found with self saucing puddings in the past is that the sauce is watery and heavy on the cocoa flavour. This sauce definitely didn’t suffer from that, though I did add a little extra brown sugar to the sauce before pouring over the batter.

UPDATE: The second try at this pudding resulted in a better cooked masterpiece thanks to a more reliable oven and I added more of the sauce mixture…but still not the entire two and a half cups (doubled recipe)…and there was more sauce than last time but still not really enough for my liking. Looks like a third try is on the cards.

Ingredients: basic
Method: Easy
Rating: 4 Stars

Ingredients:
1 Cup self-raising flour
3/4 Cup castor sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1/2 cup milk
30g butter, melted
3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/4 cup cocoa, extra
1 1/4 cups hot water

Method:
1. Sift flour, sugar and cocoa into medium bowl. Make well in centre, use wooden spoon to gradually stir in combined milk and butter, beat until smooth. Pour into 4 ovenproof dishes (3/4 cup capacity).

2. Combine brown sugar and sifted extra cocoa in jug, gradually stir in hot water, stir until smooth. Gently pour the mixture evenly over the top of each pudding, place dishes onto an oven tray to make them easy to handle. Bake in moderate oven 35 minutes or until puddings have risen to the top of the dishes and are firm to touch. Dust with a little sifter icing sugar just before serving, if desired (serves 4).

If you want to make this pudding in a single dish, you will need a dish of 4 cup capacity, and it will take about 50 minutes to cook.