Whenever I want to bake something small but nice, I bake cookies. The other day, I made one batch of a standard cookie dough, devided it into two and made two different kinds of cookies. One batch were with milk chocolate chunks, sea salt and caramel and the other batch were with dark chocolate chips and cadied orange peel.
The base recipe is my favourite recipe for simple cookies and it comes from Laura’s Bakery (a wonderful website with lots of great recipes. be warned: the website is in Dutch).
I’ll put Laura’s recipe here in English so you can all see how wonderful it is:
Basic recipe for cookies Ingredients (for 15-20 cookies) 225 grams of butter 150 grams of white caster sugar 8 grams of vanilla sugar 1 egg yolk 280 grams of plain flour pinch of salt Method: Cream together butter, sugar and vanilla sugar. Add the egg yolk and mix it through. Add flour and salt and mix them in, forming a firm dough. (At this point I split the dough into 2 portions and added the chocolate and candied peel to one batch and caramel and seasalt flavoured chocolate to the other). Wrap the dough in cling film and put it in the fridge. Let the dough rest in the fridge for at least an hour before you work with it again. I made two long sausage-shapes before wrapping them in clingfilm. After an hour, take the dough out of the fridge. Here, you have different options. You can form little balls of dough and flatten them with the back of a spoon or a fork. Alternatively, you can do what I did and make the sausage shapes before refridgerating them. Once cool, all you need to do is unwrap them and cut them into discs. The baking time for these cookies is about 16 minutes in an oven that’s been preheated to 190 degrees Celcius (374 degrees Farenheit). Depending on what you add to the cookies, the cooking time can be a little bit different. The cookies are done when the edges are golden brown. Remove the cookies from the over and let them cool for a few minutes. Then move them onto a wire rack and let them cool completely. Whatever you do, do NOT be tempted to transfer the cookies immediately after baking. They are very soft when they come out of the oven and will break as soon as you try to lift them. They will firm up during those first few minutes out of the oven and will be far easier to move to the rack then.
Femke's Favourite foodstuffs 