Chewy double chocolate cookies

Life has been crazy recently! Labs have just taken over my life slightly and then also there is sun. As soon as the sun is out all I want to do in my free time (except for baking obviously) is be outside, go for strolls around the park, go for a nice cold pint in a pub and eat as much ice cream as I can. Even though I kept on baking over the last couple of weeks, I just didn’t have the time to blog about it.

2 weeks ago, a friend and I baked for the Garden Party of our college in Oxford. We spend 2 nights and 1 morning in the kitchen baking, with always fun company, some banging 90s tunes and were surprisingly little stressed considering the amount of baking we did (check out those pictures of the baking).

But now I am back with a new blog post for ya! Last weekend, I really wanted some cookies- and rather than walking all the way to Tesco to buy some, I had all the ingredients I needed to make some chewy (and soft at the same time) double chocolate cookies. The cookies are super chocolatey and go very well with ice cream (especially on a warm summer day- just saying). And on top of that they are also very easy to make and not a lot of time effort (even better for a sunny day).

Preparing time: 15 minutes and 30 minutes chilling
Baking time: 12 minutes
Difficulty level: simple

Ingredients
250 g Butter
250 g white sugar
2 eggs
125 g cocoa powder
215 g flour
2 tsp. baking powder
150 g milk chocolate, cut into chunks
1 tsp. vanilla
pinch of salt

Mix the butter and sugar together until creamy. If you just gotten the butter out of the fridge, put it in the microwave for a couple of seconds to make your life easier. Then add the vanilla extract and salt. Add the eggs one by one and mix until you can see air bubbles forming.

In a separate bowl, weigh out the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder. Add slowly to the butter mixture and mix carefully (if you turn on the mixer too high you will basically flour your whole kitchen- and who wants to clean that up right?!).

So once you added the flour mixture, chop the chocolate into small pieces and add. Now just use a spatula to fold in those chocolate chunks. The dough now has become quite sticky and it won’t be easy to mix. If you feel like you can hardly mix it, then just add a bit of milk.

Now chill the dough for about 30 minutes and either go and lie in the sun or watch some Netflix and drink tea (totally dependent on the weather of course).

Preheat the oven to 180 °C and take the dough out of the fridge and place baking paper (or if you ran out of it just like I did, butter the baking tray). Now, using your hands, form small balls out of the cookie dough and place them on the tray.

Bake the cookies for 12 minutes, they will still be quite soft by the time you take them out but that is exactly what you want.

Now go, enjoy them either warm or cold, with ice cream or caramel sauce – maybe even chocolate sauce?!

Schwarz-Weiß Gebäck

In German, we do kinda have a separate word for Christmas cookies, which does not require the word christmas because Plätzchen are typically what we have as christmas cookies. Plätzchen includes all the recipes I will introduce here, so it covers a rather wide range. The one I am introducing this week is Schwarz-Weiß Gebäck. The Plätzchen are based on a vanilla and a cocoa dough, but the most important ingredient (well probably not most important but still rather important ingredient) is the rum. It works fine with rum aroma, but considering these cookies will be baked, it is still safe to give to children when using rum, as the alcohol will evaporate. If you are really against rum or rum aroma, you can substitute the rum with milk, but it does make a noticeable difference. I got this recipe from my grandma, and it is very delicious, but I might some slight adjustments to it, such as using more cocoa than in her recipe. As you combine the vanilla dough and the cocoa dough, having a very chocolatey dough is not a problem and actually emphasises the difference between both cookies.

Preparation time: 1 1/2 hours (1 hour chilling)
Baking time: 10 minutes
Difficulty level: medium

Ingredients

250 g Butter
250 sugar
500 g Flour
2 Eggs
3 Tbsp. rum or milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract (or if you have straight from a vanilla bean)
a pinch of salt
50 g cocoa powder
1 Tbsp. rum or milk
2 egg whites (separate)

In a bowl, mix the flour, eggs, rum (or milk), vanilla extract, sugar and salt. Quickly add the cold butter in pieces and knead into a dough.


Half the dough and put one half aside. Add the cocoa powder and rum (or milk) to the second half and mix well. This might take its time, considering cocoa powder is hydrophobic and won’t easily mix. If necessary, add some more rum. I also always taste a bit of the raw dough to make sure that it is chocolatey enough for my taste (and it gives you an excuse to snack). Chill in the fridge for an hour.

Now there are several ways of making these Schwarz-Weiß Plätzchen. Traditionally  you either make them into swirls or into squares. However, I have change the concept a bit and am making stars out of the two doughs, which also looks very impressive.

Swirls:
Roll out a part of the vanilla dough. Now take the same amount of the chocolate dough and roll out. Try to get both doughs to the same size. Then take the egg white and spread on top of the vanilla dough. Put the chocolate dough on top of the vanilla dough and then roll them along the long side. Put back in the fridge and allow to chill for another half an hour. Then cut into 1 cm thick pieces and bake for 10 minutes at 180 °C.

Squares:
Make two sausages out of each dough. Then put down the vanilla dough, next to it chocolate dough and so on. Spread egg white on top and then do another layer on top, alternating again between vanilla and chocolate dough but also making sure that chocolate dough is on top of vanilla dough etc. This will give you a checkered pattern. Bake for 10 minutes at 180 °C.

Stars:
Take two different sized star cookie cutter. Now cut out the big star and then from the stars, take the smaller cookie cutter and cut out the smaller one. Then do the same for the other dough. Now you can have big vanilla stars combined with smaller chocolate stars and vice versa. Again bake for 10 minutes at 180 °C.

Swedish Gingerbread (Pepperkaker)

Swedish Gingerbread (Pepperkaker) is a slightly different version of gingerbread than what we are used to (by we I mean German Lebkuchen as well as the english version). The reason I like it is because it reminds me of my childhood very much, not because we baked them when I was a child, but because I got the recipe out of a Astrid Lindgren recipe book. The cook book is great, as it features recipes that Astrid Lindgren described in some of her books and the gingerbread recipe is mentioned in the stories Pippi Longstocking. Astrid and Pippi were my early childhood heroes. I loved reading all of her books and my favourite ones were the ones of Pippi. The scene where the gingerbread comes into play is when Pippi bakes for all her friends (some of you might see a resembles there…) and makes these huge amounts of cookies (5 minutes into the link here).

Preparation time: 2 1/2 hours (2 hours chilling)
Baking time: 7 minutes
Difficulty level: simple

Ingredients:

300 g butter (soft)
450 g sugar
150 mL syrup
175 mL water
1 ½ teasppons ginger
1 ½ teaspoons cardamom
1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 ½ teaspoon cloves
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
900 g flour

Mix the soft butter with the sugar, syrup and water.

In a separate bowl, mix the baking powder the flour and the spices.

Slowly add it to the butter-mixture. The best thing is to just knead it with your hands even though this might be a bit weird at the start.

Once you got a dough that sticks together well, knead again for approximately 5 minutes.

Then rap the dough in kitchen foil and let it rest in the fridge for ca. 2 hours.
Preheat the oven to 200 °C. Divide the dough into several smaller pieces, and keep the pieces you are not using in the fridge. Cover the kitchen surface in flour and then roll out the dough and cut out some cookies (this can be just like back in your childhood- be creative!).

All my helpers had great fun doing this! Bake the cookies for 5-7  minutes. The baking time depends on how thick you roll out the dough and if you like the cookies to be soft. Traditionally, pepperkaker are quite thin and hard cookies, however I normally make them slightly thicker and chewy.

Pumpkin and Nutella Pie

Getting sucked into the full autumn beauty in Oxford, I decided to (for the first time) make a pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pies are quite common in the US but not so common in mainland Europe. So I decided to just give it a go and see where this is going. For a friend’s birthday (and she is obsessed with pumpkin spiced latte) I thought this would be quite suiting, as this pie contains spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger (so it also makes it slightly Christmassy). Secondly, as I think chocolate makes everything better, I wanted to find a recipe that also has some chocolate in it. So on Instagram I follow Sallysbakeblog and she has this amazing blog called Sallys baking addiction. The blog features a wide variety of recipces, covering breads, cakes, sweets and so on. So I thought this is where I would find the perfect pumpkin pie recipe and so I did. So let me introduce you to the Nutella swirled Pumpkin Pie.

Preparation time: 35 minutes
Baking time: 40 minutes
Difficulty level: simple

The crust is not a traditional pie crust, but you can easily replace the one I used with the one I used for the berry and apple pie.

Pie crust
200 g ginger cookies
2 tbsp sugar
75 g butter

Pumpkin pie filling
3 eggs
425 g pumpkin filling (from a can)
150 g heavy cream
100 g dark brown sugar
pinch of salt
1 ½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ginger
½ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cloves
60 g Nutella

Preheat the oven to 175 °C.
To start off, crumble all the ginger cookies into small cookie crumbs (I used my hands cause I did not have any zip lock bags- Bad idea guys!! It is much better if you just wrap them in some sort of kitchen foil and smash them up using a rolling pin).

crumbled up cookies

Now add the sugar to the cookie crumbs. Melt the butter and add it to the sugar-cookie mixture. Mix well and then prepare a round baking tin (I used one with a diameter of 26 cm). Add the mixture to the baking tin, pressing it down firmly. Bake for 15 minutes and allow to cool down.
In the mean time, prepare the pumpkin pie filling. Whisk the eggs until foam is forming on the surface. Open up the can and add the pumpkin puree, this might seem a bit weird but I promise it will be yummy! Using a whisk add the heavy cream and the brown sugar and just mix everything well together. Now add the salt and all the spices. And et voila, the filling is done.

Pumpkin pie filling

Carefully pour it into the prepared baking tin. Sally suggested, that heating the Nutella slightly in the microwave (she said 30 seconds) will make the swirling easier and I agree. I put the Nutella in the microwave for a short time and then added it to the pie. I used a knife to then create a swirl effect (be careful to not over-swirl though, which can be hard cause swirling is fun!).

Ready to bake!

Put the pie back in the oven and bake for 40 minutes. As you can see, I sometimes trying Take out of the oven, allow to cool down. Due to the presence of chocolate, I felt that there was no need for extra whipping cream to eat with pie with, but if you are whipping cream addict, it will be a nice addition.

All baked and ready to it!