Easy Chocolate Cookies

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I was curious about piping at one point in time last year. Decided to make this simple recipe so that I can put the new piping bags and tips in use. Though the recipe was rather simple, it wasn't something I like. Infact I find the smell of cocoa powder rather weird without mixing some chocolate into the recipe. Perhaps because I am a chocoholic I find the recipe is too light and not to my liking.

However, if I didn't remember wrongly this was my very first time doing cookies piping. It was fun though to get different star shapes out from the same star-shaped nozzle with different pressures, angles and heights. It was quite a mess as I didn't know how to fill up the piping bag at that point. Anyway it was a good experience for an amateur like me to get a feel on how to work with some of the piping utensils.

EASY CHOCHOLATE COOKIES

Ingredients

200g butter/magarine
80g icing usgar
1/2 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla essense
210g plain flour
15g cocoa powder, sifted

some chocolate chips for decoration

Method

1. Cream butter and icing sugar till just combined.

2. Add egg, vanilla and mix well.

3. Fold in flour and cocoa powder.

4. Put mixture into a piping bag fitted in with a star nozzle. Pipe dough onto a greased and lined baking sheet and decorate with a chocolate chip in the centre.

5. Bake in a preheated overn at 180deg C for about 20min. Remove and leave to cool.

Notes
1. The cookies would not expand as not leavening agents are added in. So we can safely pipe the cookies near to each other.

2. Fill the piping bag hall full so that you can have better control when you pipe out the cookies. Shake your bag and give a few twists to 'lock' the dough in the bag

3. Do not put the nozzle too near to the baking sheet as this will leave not enough room to pipe out nice star shaped cookies. Too far will cause the cookies dough flow out too long and it would be nice looking.

4. I was silly to put the flat bottom of the chocolate chips facing up. Realised it looked rather weird after half way through:)

Cocoa Oatmeal Cookies

I am very upset to find out that the DVD that I have copied in all my cooking and baking pictures was able to only retrieve none!! There are a lot of photos taken for many of my experiments but have yet been posted for sharing in my blog :(( Begging my hubby to salvage the dics and hopefully he or someone can help to retrieve all the data... still crossing my fingers! The lost taught me a good lesson that is store your data well and always if possible don't delay your blog posting!

The pictures of this post and perhaps a few of the coming subsequent posts were saved as draft sometime ago or in another drives if you are wondering where are the pictures coming from. I could not remember where I got this recipe.

I am never good in baking cookies though it is the simplest baking project we could always do with our kids. I always need to increase the baking time or oven temperature than recommended. I discovered this after a few trials.

My husband and daughter love cookies a lot but I don't bake often as I think we should have these as treats. This is quite a wholesome recipe for older kids and it tasted semi-chewy due to the raisin and oatmeal but definitely not gummy type. It is crunchy somehow and tasty however may not be so suitable for too young kids unless you chop the raisins and blend the rolled oats into smaller parts. If you like semi chewy yet crunchy and chocolate flavoured cookies, you perhaps will like this!

The recipe below will yield about 48 cookies.

Cocoa Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients

1 cup/ 223g unsalted butter (softened)
1 cup/ 220g brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essense
1 1/2 (190g) cups all purpose flour (sifted)
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups/ 245g rolled oats
1 cup/ 145g raisin

Method

1. Preheat oven to 175deg C. Grease and line the baking tray.

2. Cream butter and sugar

3. Add eggs one at a time and vanilla essense and continue to beat well.

4. Add flour, baking soda and cocoa powder and continue to beat until incorporated.

5. Stir in oats and raisin and mix well.

6. Drop one tbsp of dough on the baking tray and gently press using the bake of the fork.

7. Bake for 10-12 minutes.

Notes
1. I have used about 170g brown sugar and 50 Castor sugar as I didn't have enough brown sugar in the cupboard.

2. I have also added chocolate chips into the recipe just to give a better texture and enhance the chocolaty flavour.

3. I have used about 1 cup (120g) whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup (70g) of all purpose flour to make them more wholesome.

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Cheese Biscuits

I find this recipe pretty interesting uses a little chicken stock for flavouring. It is very easy to make also. This is a tasty savoury treat to enjoy with the whole family. Most kids will naturally love star-shaped cookies. My daughter was indeed attracted by the shape!


I made this together with the melting moments and therefore had cut the recipe into half. However, I will post the full recipe here.

Ingredients
A : (sifted)
360g plain flour
2 tbsp chicken stock
1/4 tsp pepper
1 tsp chilli powder (optional)

B
200g butter
250g grated cheddar cheese
1/2 egg lightly beaten

Glazing
1/2 egg lightly beaten with pinch of salt

Method
1. Rub butter into the dry ingredients and mix till it resembles bread crumb.
Add 3/4 portion of grated cheese and mix weell
3. Add egg to combine the dough well. Cover with a cling wrap and chill in the fridge for about 20 minutes
4. Preheat oven to 180deg C.
4. Rolled out dough into 3mm and use star shaped cookies cutter to cut out the star.
5. Greased and line baking tray. Place the cut cheese stars on the baking tray and sprinkle with the remaining cheese.
6. Bake for about 20 minutes or more until golden brown.
7. Remove from oven and let it cool completely before storing.

Notes:
1. As both cheese and chicken stock are salty, my advice is to reduce the amount for both if you don't like salty stuff.

2. Though recipe call for 20-minute baking time, I find that I always need to increase baking time to another 10 -15 minutes to get the right result for my oven.

3. This biscuit tastes better and crunchier if you bake slightly longer.

(Recipe was extracted from 'I can Bake' from Agnes Chang)

Melting Moments

This was one of the first few cookies i tried baking. I did this recipe together with the cheese start biscuits. Both recipes were taken from Agnes Chang's cookbook called 'I Can Bake'. I cut down the ingredients into half for both recipes as my purpose was mainly to test and do experiment on how my oven works on cookies baking.


My daughter loves these cookies a lot and I love to see how she enjoyed nibbling bit by bit of this small little treat! I am sure younger children will love these cookies a lot as they don't need to chew a lot and it melted in your mouth within seconds. I baked this as snacks for my daughter during the peak of the China's scandal of the melamine tainted dairy products last year. I am not sure if I could somehow use and modify this recipe and used it to make the crust for the pineapple tarts. I should try it out soon before Chinese New Year!

I wasn't very happy with the look of the cookies though. It was my very first experience in using piping tip, coupler and piping bag. I can still remember I was struggling on how to put the coupler in the bag, how to fill the bag with the mixture, how to squeeze, what angle and strength. It was quite a mess!

MELTING MOMENT

Ingredients
200g butter
80g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
¼ tsp salt
120g self raising flour
120g corn flour

Some icing sugar for dusting

Method

1. Preheat oven at 170deg C.

2. Cream butter, icing sugar, vanilla and salt until just combined

3. Add self-rising flour, corn flour and mix into a soft dough.Spoon mixture into a piping bag fitted with a big star nozzle. Pipe onto a greased baking tray to form into the shape of a rosette

4. Bake for about 15 to 20 min

5. Cool at rack, sprinkle some icing sugar on top if desired. Store in air tight tin before serving.

Basic Butter Cookies

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I have not been updating my blog for more than 2 months. October and November this year were rather busy months, full of ups and downs in my history of life. I was busy in the early part of October to prepare for my daughter's 2nd birthday. Later part of October I was saddened very much by the departure of my late fifth uncle. He was my uncle, the brother whom my dad doted a lot. Though he seldom came back in the early years after his marriage and migration to Holland, he made more trips back to visit us in recent years. This favourite uncle of mine somehow was very closed to me and my other siblings though we don't see him often... this kind of bonding, love and respect that we had for him is unexplainable .. yes blood is always thicker than water! I grief until today for the loss so does each one of my family members in KL especially my dad but we know that we have to move on with lifes. We miss him....

Then I was busy in November with my cake decorating class that I signed up in August and also my daughter fell illed with fever. I am now in KL visiting my family and I am glad to see that at least everyone looks and feels 'okie' and better now. As the year is going to end soon, I thought I better spend some time now writing and posting the rest of my baking adventures this year. So you will be seeing more new posts about pies, tarts, cookies and especially cake decorations! Check it out!



This recipe was done quite a while ago and was my first experiment of making cookies. The recipe was extracted from the 'Biscuits, Breads & Cookies' from Lynn Bedford Hall. I definitely have not read and seen enough baking recipes books but I do think that this is a book that I should get one for my baking library soon as I like the varieties yet specialised for both the modern and traditional recipes introduced.

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The cookies tasted very buttery and crunchy. The used of good quality butter is important i think. Though I am a chocoholic but i prefer the original basic vanilla flavoured cookies than the chocolate ones for this recipe.




BASIC BUTTER COOKIES

Ingredients
(Make about 30)

220g Bread flour
110g Unsalted butter
170g Castor sugar
1 egg lightly beaten
Few drops of vanilla essence
1 tsp Cream of tartar
½ tsp Baking soda

Method

1. Preheat oven 180deg c. Grease the baking pan.

2. Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla essence and beat.

3. Sift the bread flour with the baking soda and cream of tartar. Add to the mixture and stir until incorporated. Mix to a soft dough and then shape into a ball with your hands.

5. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 12 minutes or until pale beige in colour. Cool on wire rack.

Variations
I had doubled up all the ingredients and made another batch of chocolate butter cookies. The recipe and method are as follows:
- Sift 2 tsp cocoa powder with the dry ingredients and add about 43g grated
semisweet chocolate to the dough.


Notes:
1. Space each cookies about 2 inch as the cookies will expand a fair bit.
2. The dough does not meant for cookie-press therefore it did not keep its shape well. So don't use cookies cutter for this recipe as the shape will run.
3. Use scraper to scrape and transfer the rolled and flatten dough to the baking tray.
4. I need to increase the baking duration to another 10 - 15 minutes for my oven. So you may need to check how your oven works. The best way is to test baking one before putting the whole tray in. That will save a lot of hassle of taking in and out the whole tray from the oven to check whether it is cooked and to me it is safer to have one biscuit spoiled rather than the whole tray!