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

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.