I know you’ve all been waiting for the biscuits post. Well… some of you have anyway. Oh, ok… maybe three of you. And you would have had it sooner if my train home hadn’t been delayed – thanks for that, Deutsche Bahn! Anyway… on with the post…
On Saturday we were invited to a WG party (a WG or Wohngemeinschaft is basically a flatshare – Wohngemeinschaft literally translates as living community). One of the items on my – as yet incompete – 35 before 35 list is to bake ten different kinds of biscuit. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone – by baking biscuits I would have something to bring along to the party and make a start on another list item. Perfect!
I chose to make Chocolate Cherry Cookies using a recipe I found on the BBC Good Food website (click the name of the cookies for the recipe… but open it in a new tab. You want to stay here after all, don’t you?).
Stupidly right up until the mixture was almost ready I managed to overlook the fact that the dough wanted to be refrigerated for 2 hours before baking. Whaaaat?! I only finished making the dough at 10pm! Now I was going to have to wait til midnight before I could even bake the first batch! Buuut, the recipe did say “2 hours or until firm”. Maybe I would get lucky?
I initially left the dough in the fridge for half an hour. At 10:30, I took the bowl out, discovered the mixture to be nowhere near firm, then decided to try my luck anyway for at least a few cookies. It’s not like I was going to run out of mixture any time soon!
The mixture was still verrrry sticky as I tried to roll balls of it in icing sugar, but I persevered long enough to get eight of them:
Into the oven went the eight raw cookies while the remaining mixture went back into the fridge. After 12 minutes (the supposed baking time), I found the cookies still rather sticky, so back into the oven they went.
At 5 past 11, experimental batch 1 came out of the oven and I decided to try for another batch. The middle of the mixture was still pretty sticky, but around the edges was firm enough, so I used that. It certainly made rolling the balls easier!
I also discovered the reason some balls had ended up so large was because the cherries inside them were large. Yes, it was a bit of a “well, duh!!” moment…
I carried on like that, putting the mixture back in the fridge as each batch was cooking and using those bits of dough that had managed to get firm in that time before eventually deciding enough was enough and going to bed. It was 1 a.m. by that time! The next morning, I was up bright and early to make a couple more batches before going out for the day. The mixture was certainly firm now… so firm that I had to use a spoon to break bits off for rolling into balls!
Ironically, after all that we ended up not even going to the party. But at least I made a start on another list item… and Jan had some yummy cookies to take to work this morning (he was supposed to take them yesterday… but he forgot). Apparantly his colleagues had been asking when I would be baking again…
YUM. And congrats on getting to work on another item from the list! I’m trying to work on a couple of biggies from mine at the moment!
Ooh, good luck!
Aaaaah. I’ve had my fix. Look forward to the other nine you’ve got coming up.
Now all I need to do is think of another 9 types of biscuit…
Easy. Plätzchen! By Christmas, you can tick that one off your list.
Yaaaay the biscuits! Haha loved your “Well, duuh,” moment! 😛 I’ve just got back from lunch where I was good and didn’t partake in a sweet treat, and now I’ve seen this, I WANT/NEED something else to get me through the afternoon…! 🙂
I hope they were worth the time – they look it! Sainsburys stopped making their gorgeous cherry chocolate cookies, I still hunt for them when I go back but they seem to have vanished – maybe when I have an oven again I’ll have to try my own…!
Well, Jan’s colleages ate them all within a day so they must have been pretty good 😉
Yum, they sure do look good! I wonder if you could’ve cut the cherries in half to make them smaller? That sounds dumb and obvious, just ignore me. :p
Not as dumb as my “Oh, it won’t get any smaller because the cherry is so big!” moment…
I used cherries from a jar and they were kind of soft and soggy, so cutting them may have been more awkward than anything else.
Ah, the classic ‘my balls are too big’ problem 😉
You have NO IDEA how well that comment plays in to an in-joke between my group of friends 😀
Glad me and my big balls (comment) could be of service 😉
Those look delicious. Can’t wait to see the 9 other biscuits!
These look great! I have totally stalled on my own biscuits challenge, so maybe I’ll give these a go to get it kick started!
They were very nice 🙂