Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Rustic White Chocolate Chunk Cookies


Warning: This one’s a long one, you might want to make a cuppa first!

The Workaholic surprised me the other day by ordering me two Martha Stewart cookbooks, one on cupcakes (ofcourse!) and one on cookies. Thank you Workaholic!

I have a confession to make. I don’t often feature cookies or slices on my blog. I do make them fairly regularly. The Workaholic asked me why I didn’t do more or write about them and the first thing that sprung to mind to say was “there just not pretty enough”. Gasp! Can you believe I said that? How superficial of me!

The real problem, as a few of you can vouch for, is my OCD. I like things to be neat and ordered and presentation is everything. If it doesn’t photograph well, it can’t feature on my blog. Cupcakes and normal cakes seem to photograph so well and are quite easy to make pretty!

This is a bit of a shame really, as I have done some fabulous tasting biscuits, cookies, slice and more recently, tried a few more savoury things, but can not bring myself to put them on the blog. The savoury stuff, in particular, just does not photograph well, yet on the plate it looks scrummy!

Anyway, I am going to be brave here and start featuring some of the cookies, biscuits and slices and we are going to call them “rustic”. Okay!!!!!!!

Anyway, we had a bit of a break from the endless blue skies of Alice Springs recently and the heavens opened up for about a week, constantly. It was on one of those days, a cold and wet Saturday, when we were all starting to get cabin fever when my books arrived! Oh joy. I just love getting a new cookbook and spend hours pouring over it, planning what to bake or cook.

The kids and I piled onto my bed and snuggled down and dreamed. Poor loves have no option but to get into my passion! My five year old can even theme and group menus, such as “we could do this one, that one and this one for Valentine’s Day” or “these three would be good for Christmas”. If only I channelled his talents into good (ie the ABC’s and 123) instead of my evil baking, he’d be a genius!

Another confession of mine is that I tend to avoid things with nuts or fruit in them. I keep telling myself it is because I don’t like fruit or nut in baking, and that is true to a point. I would choose a non fruit or nut thing over a fruit and nut thing any day. However, when I push myself to bake with them, I usually find I quite like them. I just need to push past the mental block.

My eye was caught by a picture of a White Chocolate Chunk Cookie in the Martha Stewart Cookies book (page 172). The white chocolate just looked all gooey and chewy and yummy. However, it also contained walnuts and raisins! Take a breath, you can do this.

It was quite an easy recipe but it contained lots of good stuff to give it great texture, coconut, rolled oats etc.



I love a good cookie mix, especially one that features brown sugar. And this one does. So you do the usual butter, white sugar, brown sugar beating. Then add egg and vanilla and beat. Followed by the flour. At this point I have to taste the mixture. This is my favourite tasting batter, I use this one for my choc chip cookies. Must be the brown sugar.



I was a bit worried as the mix looked a bit dry, but I went with it, hoping the next lot of ingredients would add the moisture.

At this point you add everything else, coconut, white chocolate, oats, walnuts and raisins (although I didn’t have raisins so substituted with sultanas) and mix. The batter felt really heavy and dense.

The recipe calls for you to drop spoonfuls on a tray and slightly flatten. I did this for the first tray but the came out looking a bit misshapen and “rustic” so my OCD took over and I started rolling the mix into balls and flattening (pic below). In the end, to my surprise I thought these looked like they were trying too hard and I wish I had of stuck with rustic. No pleasing some people.



They came out of the oven smelling divine. I always take cookies/biscuits out when they are a bit underdone and let them harden on the tray. I prefer my cookies chewy. The white chocolate was all gooey and the combination of flavours of the chocolate, coconut, walnuts and fruit was beautiful, full on and very hard to stop at just one!

RUSTIC

OCD Shaped ones!
Which is why, even though the Workaholic was out of town for a few days, I had to drop them into his work anyway and get rid of them before those 20kg I lost last year, flew back on! He received 3 phone calls to tell him how good they were – which probably just rubbed it in, given he was 2,500km away in Darwin! LOL!

1 comment:

  1. I so love reading your blog Kate - gives me a chuckle - and i dream i am tasting these yummy treats - which seems to do the trick!!

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