Day 174: a balanced cookie
I’ve never made a satisfactory batch of cookies before. They either come out undercooked and burnt at the edges or like dry cake on the inside with not so much as a whisper of crunch about them. I was happy(ish) with my attempt at N’s Triple Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies (Day 8), though I knew I could do better. The problem, of course, is my lack of mindfulness when cooking: I’m very much the kind of person that begins a task and then wanders off - along with their mind - to do something else, which you can’t really do when baking cakes, cookies, or pies, as every minute (30 seconds, even) can make a drastic difference on your resulting bake.
I usually set the oven alarm for a minute under what a recipe states, with the intention of being organised and on-form, but then end up leaving the alarm ringing for five minutes whilst finishing whatever it was that distracted me in the first place.
I refused to let my wandering thoughts best me this time! With determination and focus, at nearly 11:00pm on Tuesday evening, I set to work mixing up a batch of Nigella’s Chocolate Chip Cookies; baking them in accurately-timed batches and ending up with the perfect balance of chew and crunch.
Nigella’s Chocolate Chip Cookies
I didn’t have even close to the amount of milk chocolate chips needed for the recipe, so I made up about half of the weight with a mix of chocolates - white, milk, dark - and the rest of it with snipped up dried apricots, which added a gorgeous sour-sweet chew. Now, my self-set 365 Days of Nigella mission brief does clearly specify that recipes must be as close to the original as possible in order to be counted in the cookalong; changing ingredients only if there are sourcing or dietary obstacles. Well, I class this as a sourcing issue: I needed to cook to help me wind down and at nearly midnight on a school night - with no 24-hour supermarket in my vicinity - you gotta work with what you got!
You can find the recipe for these on p256 of Kitchen and also on nigella.com (link below).
