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 160ºC.
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

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.

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. 

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.

Simple Chocolate Cake I

As far as simple chocolate cakes go, this one is basic. All the ingredients were readily available in my fridge and pantry and they all went together easily with the most effort required for chopping and melting the 250g butter. To cook this cake I used my smallest cake tin, 20cm (9 inch), and it barely filled the tin. Perhaps I should have used a loaf tin, or I should have doubled the recipe! Once cooked I iced the cake with a nice simple icing consisting of cocoa, icing sugar and heated milk, combined and mixed.

The texture of the final cake felt grainy in my mouth and the taste was less than desirable. Not only was there an unpleasant aftertaste (I assuming was due to the abundant amount of melted butter) but it left my stomach feeling a little queasy soon after consumption. Needless to say that the majority of the cake went into the bin as it was pretty much inedible.

Ingredients: Basic
Method: Easy
Rating: 1 Star

Ingredients:
1 cup self-raising flour
3 tablespoons cocoa
250g butter
1/2 cup castor sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 eggs

Method:

1. In a bowl, combine flour, cocoa, sugar, vanilla essence and melted butter.

2. Add eggs and mix together for 1 minute

3. Pour into a lined cake tin and bake for 25 - 35 minutes at 160C

4. If the cake springs back it's cooked. Do not overcook.

Mrs B’s Chocolate Cake

It’s not the simplest chocolate cake, but it is damn close. With a few additional ingredients (which I was surprised I had in the pantry, vinegar and I used vegetable oil) beyond what I would call a basic cake, this recipe produced a medium dense, moist cake with a bubbly, airy, texture. If you have ever eaten an aero chocolate bar, the texture of the cake reminded me of one of those. It was practically fool proof to make, simply sift the dry ingredients, add all the wet ingredients and beat! Can it get any easier than that? Well there is all the measuring and melting, which does make it harder then most packet cakes, but the end product is so much better.

From this recipe I made a small nine (9) inch round cake and six (6) medium sized muffins. I had the muffins on the top rack of the oven, and obviously they didn’t need as long to cook as the cake, but once they were cool enough I lathered on some icing and they were devoured instantly.

I had no cream to make a genache, so I improvised whipping about 2 oz of margarine with the electric beaters, then adding 50g of melted dark chocolate and about half a cup of icing sugar and whipping again to make a very buttery chocolate icing.

Ingredients: Regular
Method: Easy
Rating: 4.5 Stars


Ingredients
1 2/3 cup SR Flour
1 1/4 cup Sugar
2/3 cup Cocoa
1 1/2 teaspoon Carb Soda
1 Tbspn Vinegar + enough milk to make up 1 1/2 cups
1/4 cup Oil
2 oz marg (melted)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon Vanilla Essence

Method
Sift dry ingredients into large bowl, add all other ingredients and beat on low for 1/2 min, then increase to high for 2 mins. Pour batter into a greased and bottom lined 9" tin or 2 smaller tines. Bake in moderate oven 35-45 mins or until cooked when tested. (A large tin will need the 45 mins). Turn out of tin and leave to cool. Ice with chocolate icing or your choice.
* for special occasions you can split the cake in half and fill with whipped cream and top with a Chocolate Ganache or you can put ganache in the middle of cake too.