17 August 2007

The biscuit madness continues

Since last week’s biscuits were such a delicious success, I have today once more ventured forth into the kitchen with intent to create cookies. I managed to show a little restraint and only made one variety insted of three, but boy, is it a good one: Scrummy Chocolate Shortbread Swirls from the Green and Black’s chocolate cookbook.

If you’d like to try these without having to fork out for the really rather fabulous book I’ve just mentioned (alas, no, I’m not on commission), you can easily improvise them as follows:

• Make up dough for shortbread as per this recipe, roll into a ball, cover with cling film and pop into the fridge to cool.
• Repeat, this time substituting 25g cocoa for flour.
• Roll out each ball of dough into rectangles of approximately the same size and about 1cm thick. You’ll need to use a well-floured surface and keep your rolling pin covered in the stuff too.
• Put the plain dough onto a sheet of greaseproof paper (I found this quite hard to do as the rolled out dough is very fragile. It doesn’t matter if it breaks apart though as you can quite easily smoosh it together again). Put the chocolate dough on top (again with the fragility and the smooshing).
• Chop 100g dark chocolate into small pieces and sprinkle onto the dough. I have to say that 100g was what it says in the recipe but I think that it’s a bit too much. Hard to imagine that I would ever utter the words, ‘too much chocolate’, but there you go. Next time I think I’ll try 60g instead.
• Using the greaseproof paper, roll the dough up as tightly as you can, stuffing any escaping chocolate back in as you go along. Close the ends up – just squish or smoosh them, whichever is your personal preference. Then, roll it all in the greaseproof paper until it gets longer – mine today was about 40cm long, but that’s not what it says in the recipe book – who cares?
• Carefully cut off 1cm-ish slices and put onto greaseproof paper on a baking tray – they will need room to spread.
• Bake at 150 degrees or so for about 25 minutes – the plain shortbread should be just starting to go slightly golden. Transfer to a wire rack to cool, snaffling any of the very hot fragile bits that drop off as you go (baker’s perks).

They are a bit fiddly to make but for all the faff involved they’re lots of fun and the end result is utterly gorgeous.

Filed under: Recipes - Non-soup — Clare @ 4:03 pm