Tag: miscellaneous

Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

5051011 Processed with VSCO with e3 presetNothing quite beats a café with ‘70s-‘80s music blaring everywhere. I do suck energy from my surroundings. A dearth of atmosphere, a tinge of something exciting, is sure to drain me. Don’t get me wrong, I love a deathly quiet, but I also like looking up from my screen sometimes, examine faces and bodies so different and unique, or sip a coffee without bothering the librarian. Here in London, the sun is shining. Yesterday it was pouring like every cloud was trying to squeeze out its last drops for all of eternity.

Diary excerpts:

9/6: Always looking for an excuse to start anew. But why not now? Why not on a Sunday? Isn’t Sunday the first day of the week in many parts of the world anyway?// dark turquoise is my new favourite colour.

10/6: Why does coffee everywhere in London have to be so expensive? Never mind, it’s worth it for all the café ambiences I soak myself in everyday// researchers can now use single-cell sequencing to detect differences in RNA expression in cells, thus showing when they decide to progress from neural crest cells to something more specialized.

After watching Chris Morocco speak sweet nothings in his video demonstration of Bon Appetit’s ‘best’ chocolate chip cookie, I decided to give it a go. The way he talked about the beauty of the mosaic made when ripples of unevenly chopped heap of chocolate melt and bake in a creamy batter, the way something as simple as a cookie is transformed upon a simple, short cook of butter… it was all too tempting. Having not made anything with browned butter in ages, I took the risk (I still tend to burn things, so yes this was considered a risk) and set to work. He states in this particular recipe to brown just half a cup of the butter first before adding the rest in, but I went ahead and browned all of it at once, which yielded (perhaps) not an identical result to Chris’, but nevertheless retained the toffee-like, smoldering notes of butter cooked down to an almost clear brown liquid.

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Secondly, the recipe specifies that one large egg and 2 egg yolks be used, but with exactly 2 eggs left in the fridge, I used that instead. Due to that alone, I was afraid of the cookies not turning out as dense and chewy as demonstrated, but I was proven wrong with my final, accidental amendment: So, Chris used dark brown sugar, and so did I. But unlike what I saw in the video, mine was dark. As in, straight-up camp molasses. Almost. It was therefore much harder to incorporate when mixing with the butter, because of how much stickier and clumped together it was. But that exact density and stickiness, although they did make the cookies darker in colour, also let them retain a most tempting, delicious density and chewiness all throughout its body.

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Brown butter chocolate chip cookies (inspired by BA’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies– makes 16 cookies)

*= vegan substitution

Ingredients

200g (1.5 cups) plain flour

1 tsp fine salt (leave out if you’re using salted butter)

1 tsp baking soda

170g (0.75 cups) butter (*vegan butter or margarine)

50g (0.25 cups) sugar

200g (1 cup) dark brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 eggs (*2 vegan eggs, made by mixing 2 heaped tbsp. ground flaxseed with 5 tbsp water in a small bowl, and letting that gel up for a minute)

170g dark chocolate, chopped

Directions

Preheat your oven to 180C (350F) and line two baking trays with parchment paper.

Place your butter into a saucepan and, on medium heat, melt the butter and continue to let it cook until it turns a toffee brown and looks almost clear. There will be some frothy, lighter bits on top. Swirl the pan occasionally while the butter melts. Once it is browned, set it aside for a while to cool. In a small bowl, briefly whisk together the flour, salt, chocolate and baking soda. Add the brown and white sugar to the browned butter and whisk until the sugar dissolves. Make sure there are no lumps. Add the eggs (or vegan eggs) and whisk to incorporate everything well, and you get a smooth, lump-free batter.

Add the dry mix containing the chocolate to the wet egg mixture. You should get a moist batter that still drops off a wooden spoon relatively easily.

Using an ice cream scoop or a tablespoon, place dollops of equally-sized batter on your lined sheets, making sure there’s at least 2 inches of space between each circle of batter. As the original recipe states, let the flour hydrate by letting the batter sit for a while on the trays for 5 minutes. Then bake the cookies (one tray before the other, or both at the same time), for 8 minutes. Let them sit for a while before eating up. Alternatively these can be made and frozen ahead of a time you want to consume them.

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Tahini Chocolate Cookies

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A recent getaway. Copenhagen, Denmark. Krakow, Poland. Then cookies, to seal the whole package.

The getaway was exciting and almost necessary. Been feeling a little off lately and the short jetset abound with strange and foreign sights and experiences set my world into perspective– I’m just a small human being sitting on one tiny part of this huge amazing world with bigger problems to immerse myself in.

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Thin, crisp, and chewy like no other. An entire sweet day compressed into a disc, strewn with melted chocolate chunks big and small, aching in the wake of a heady river of tahini. And how easy!

I believe in the almighty simple chocolate chip cookie. But the twist of tahini offers something enigmatic and alluring. This alone will do you such good.

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Tahini Chocolate Cookies (makes 10-12 medium cookies)

Ingredients

120ml (0.5 cup) light tahini

1 egg (vegan sub: 2 flax eggs, make by mixing 2 tbsp ground flaxseed with 4 tbsp water and let set aside at the beginning)

115g salted butter, at room temperature (vegan sub: vegan butter). If your butter is really hard, microwave it for half a minute

180g sugar (I used a mix of light brown and white, you can do the same or stick to either or)

1 tsp vanilla extract

150g plain flour

0.5 tsp baking powder

0.5 tsp baking soda

150g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks

 

Directions

Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper and preheat your oven to 180C (350F). In a medium bowl, using a whisk or electrical whisk, beat together the room temperature butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. This will take less than a minute if your butter is relatively soft. Then add the egg, vanilla and tahini, and beat well until you get a smooth, creamy batter that drops off your whisk easily.

In a separate bowl, briefly mix together the flour, chopped chocolate, baking powder and baking soda. If you didn’t use salted butter, add a teaspoon of fine salt to this dry mix, at this point.

Add this flour mix to the wet tahini-egg mix and mix until well combined. Scoop heaped tablespoonfuls of batter onto your lined tins, leaving at least 2 inches of space between each spoonful of batter to let the cookies spread and look less ugly (but ugly ones are still okay).

Bake the cookies, one tin at a time or both at the same time, for 15 minutes. They will look light-golden on top but still wet in the middle. This will continue to set after you take the cookies out. Take them out and, with both hands holding each end of the pan, lightly drop them on the counter-top to let gravity drop the bellies of the cookies. This technique will create crazy-chewy cookies with crisp, browned edges.

These are best enjoyed warm, and can be kept at room temperature for up to a week.

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White Chocolate Kladdkaka

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The sun is streaming in bright and warm in this café. The shot of soy milk in my iced Americano is a weak ivory, colour and taste slowly being watered down by all that ice. As ivory as the white chocolate that was the death of me the past weekend.

So a word or two about white chocolate. The ‘low-grade, ‘fake’, the stuff that will never live up to the heady lusciousness of her dark and milk sisters. If white chocolate has no quality of chocolate to offer (cocoa solids, caffeine maybe), perhaps it should not even be called chocolate. But it’s still a chocolate derivative– cocoa butter, sugar, milk solids, and the process and pleasure involved in consuming chocolate, dark or white or in between, is nevertheless the same. A silky richness, a smooth going-down.

And now for kladdkaka, a simple Swedish cake, and very much more of a brownie in its own right. Typically made with dark chocolate, or a mix of dark and milk. White chocolate? The Swedish may dislike this, but with some white chocolate Easter eggs lying around, why not, I thought. The prevailing thought: why not. It’s as fudgy as fudge gets, moist, and most importantly, sticky, especially in the middle. That’s what makes it pretty unique. I took a risk baking this jussst until set at the 20-minute mark, but that was perfect, and set up just as well as I had hoped, as it continued to cool after baking.

Last week consisted of more work, feeling more strongly upon seeing people than I anticipated, almost as if totally out of control, leading to dreams similarly on this same level of bewilderment, too vivid for me to process as not real, to the point where I woke up and literally said, oh shit, that wasn’t real at all, out loud. I guess we all have those days. Making this cake was a sweet, sensible end to all the incomprehension the past week, incomprehension borne out of my own incapability of teasing out my own emotions about a variety of things in work and in relationships. It’s not that I don’t know at least a little bit why I feel this way, but I wonder if my mind is playing up, or if I’m simply someone who becomes too emotionally attached to everything and everyone too easily, making myself think I’m ok with doing things which a lot of other people get away with, with no consequence. I wonder what other people do when they don’t know how or what to feel.

I’ve also finished watching Osmosis and Dark, two short but intense series on Netflix, which probably made me feel a lot of things and contributed to that lack of self-comprehension on a subconscious level. In any case, and after all that blabber, I highly recommend both series.

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In the original recipe I referred to, the eggs and sugar were beat together for 7 minutes, although I found my mixture to reach a pale and fluffy consistency at the 5-minute mark with aquafaba, so play around with 5-7 minutes. An electrical whisk/beater is crucial here. You don’t want too-tired arms getting in the way of the fun of the whole process, and the speed and efficiency of an electrical whisk will get your egg-sugar mixture to where you need it to be in no time. You want it to be quite a bit more voluminous than what you see when you first start whisking the mixture. Same goes for the aquafaba, the stuff I used, which takes quite a while to whip up anyway.

I’m not sure if people have strong opinions on using salted butter in their recipes, but since I always have salted butter in my fridge, I almost always end up using it to bake anyway. It adds a nice dispersed flavour of salt, without ever making your final product actually taste salty. Also saves you the hassle of going out to buy a new block. The easy incorporation balances the heady sweetness of white chocolate. Look at that squidge, below, right there, in the centre, and tell me you don’t want to make this.

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White Chocolate Kladdkaka (makes 1 9-inch cake, modified from this recipe)

Ingredients

150g salted butter (if not salted, add a 1/2 teaspoon of salt to the dry mix later on)

150g good quality white chocolate (vegan/normal)

150g plain flour

1 tsp vanilla extract

150g white sugar

6 tbsp aquafaba (the egg-white looking liquid left after draining a can of chickpeas), or 2 whole eggs

 

Directions

Preheat your oven to 180C (350F) and grease a 9-inch cake pan. I used one with a removable bottom (like for cheesecakes) just so it’s easy to take out, and I’m lazy when it comes to greasing and lining things just like other humans sometimes.

Melt the butter and white chocolate together in a saucepan on medium heat, or in the microwave in a microwave-safe bowl. If microwaving, take out every minute to stir, and so the chocolate doesn’t catch and cook too fast in the middle. Set aside this melted mixture aside for now while you put together the rest of the cake.

In a bowl, and using an electrical whisk, beat together the aquafaba/eggs and sugar for at least 5 minutes, until light, fluffy, and more voluminous than when you first started. Then add the white chocolate-butter mixture, vanilla extract, and flour (and salt if you did not use salted butter). Pour the thick but droppy batter into your greased tin and bake for 20-22 minutes. A wooden skewer inserted will come out pretty wet, but this is normal. The cake will continue to cook when you take it out to set. Once you’ve left it to cool for around 10 minutes, dust on some icing sugar, then eat plain, or with yoghurt and berries. Simply divine.

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Raspberry Peanut Butter Pancakes

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There’s nothing like the cross-section of a fluffy pillow-like pancake, reeking of some overly airy ethereal quality before you soak it in maple syrup and drench it in other whatnots (Nutella people, where are you). Back to the pillow pancake days. Dreamy, fluffy, soft pancakes are the only sort of pancakes that should exist. Though I’m partial to the odd, flat, crepe-like English pancake, I can only bring myself to have those with lemon juice and sugar when Pancake Tuesday actually comes round, although the tradition itself still lies outside my own realm of habit, let alone desire. After a long week polka-dotted with bouts of stress and self-doubt, a cool and fresh Saturday morning and some yoga was all that was needed to set the mind straight again. These pancakes just so happened to be the icing on top of all of that.

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For the sake of simplicity and ease, unlike my previous pillow pancake recipes, this one doesn’t have the buttermilk component, although I’m sure that will also work supremely well here anyway. If you do wish, simply add a tablespoon of vinegar to a cup measurement, then fill the rest of the cup with milk, and wait for a couple of minutes to let the milk curdle a little, infusing it with a mild tanginess that complements the raspberries that are added in a little later. Yet, even without this vegan buttermilk mix, the frozen raspberries which melt a little as you cook the batter offers the same effect. Just as how an individual’s nature is a unique variation on the original theme (DNA!), these raspberry peanut butter pancakes are a unique twist on your classic Pancake Sunday (or Pancake Tuesday in the UK if you’re feeling that rebellious).

These go too well with thick plant yoghurt like coconut or soy, maple syrup, and just a touch more peanut butter on the side. More berries too if you wish. If making for a large group of people, after cooking, place the pancakes next to each other on a baking pan and keep them warm in an oven turned on at low heat, before plating and serving.

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Raspberry Peanut Butter Pillow Pancakes (makes around 6 medium pancakes)

Ingredients

190g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

3 tbsp sugar (white/coconut)

½ tsp fine salt

1 banana, mashed

30g melted unsalted butter

2 heaped tbsp peanut butter (smooth or chunky, that’s up to you)

2 handfuls of frozen raspberries

240ml (1 cup) milk of choice (I used unsweetened soy) 

Directions

First, whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar in a medium bowl. Microwave the peanut butter until it becomes soft and drippy. Add the warm peanut butter, mashed banana, milk and melted butter to the bowl, then use a spoon to mix everything until just about evenly incorporated. Finally, add the frozen raspberries and briefly whisk them in until they are evenly dispersed throughout the batter. Heat a pan on medium-high heat and add a pat of butter. Once the butter has melted and is slightly sizzling, turn the heat to medium, then ladle in the pancake batter– half a ladle or 2 heaped tbsp would make for one pancake. Wait a minute or until you can see the edges going a little dry, then flip to cook the other side. Continue ladling and flipping until you have finished up all the batter. Enjoy with yoghurt, more peanut butter and berries, and a drizzle of maple syrup. YUM. Just yum.

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Matcha Scones

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First, yet late, post of the new year. Ready to make some changes and start anew despite a slightly rough start, such as being more regular on this platform…! I realised that, despite how much I love Instagram and how such a platform exposed me to like-minded, passionate individuals, it’s this more personal, open space that, on occasion, does feel more like a space that induces more openness and lengthy talks about nothing and everything. How a simple matcha scone can offer so much pleasure, how a bleak future and more job losses thanks to AI actually may create more jobs, how my screen now has a small but rather obvious crack, how Thursdays may be better for starting new habits than Mondays… you know, that sort of thing. Everything and nothing. Instagram isn’t made for excessively long captions, and the algorithm has blinded me to some of my own dear friends’ posts. That’s annoying. So here’s to not panicking over these silly minutiae of daily life, and start embracing what truly makes us happy, even if it seems as if no one is looking or listening. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but isn’t that the point? Here, I don’t have to care.

 

Matcha scone, oh matcha scone. I haven’t made something so simple and delicious in a while. These quite literally are effortless, so if you do have an oven, there is no excuse not to at least try. Yes, I know matcha powder can be quite unnecessarily pricey, especially here in London, so experiment with whatever other bold flavour you may have hanging around in the house. An element of bitterness or tanginess will add a unique aftertaste, hence I used matcha powder, but mix in a cluster of frozen berries, or cocoa powder, and you will still end up with a similar effect, embodied in something especially flavourful and special.

 

The beautiful thing about this batter is that the vegan butter, which is naturally soft on its own, doesn’t have to be left out for a while to get to room temperature. Simply scoop however much you need right from the tub, and dump it straight into the dry mixture. Of course, use normal butter if you already have that on hand. You will first be enraptured by the smell of these baking, and there’s no going back once you sink your teeth into the soft flakiness of the scones. You can go the extra mile and up the flake level by cubing your butter first and putting it in the freezer for at least 10 minutes before mixing it into the dry mix, but I was, well, lazy, and still had incredibly flaky yummy scones. These are too perfect right out of the oven with a cup of tea or coffee. If storing them in the freezer, leave to thaw before consuming. I recently discovered that cutting one scone along its length and toasting each half made it feel and look as if the scone was fresh out of the oven.

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Ingredients

For the scones:

245g plain flour (alternatively, use half whole-wheat and half white)

115g sugar (white or coconut)

1 tbsp baking powder

½ baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 tbsp ground flaxseed

2 tbsp water

2 tbsp matcha powder (I used the one by Matcha Reserve, which is my favourite brand so far)

120ml (half a cup) plant milk of choice– I used almond

90g (6 tbsp) vegan butter (alternatively, use normal butter)

 

For the icing:

60g (a half cup) of icing sugar

1 tbsp plant milk of choice (I used almond again, you can use whichever you prefer– coconut/oat etc)

 

 

Directions

In a little saucer, mix together the ground flaxseed and 2 tbsp of water and set this aside to form your flax egg.

Preheat your oven to 220C (425F) and line a baking tray with parchment paper. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, matcha powder, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Then add the butter and milk, and mix with your fingertips until the dough comes together. Don’t overmix this scone batter otherwise you will get rubbery dough once it’s baked. The batter should not be too dry– the butter should make it slightly moist to the touch but not slippery or wet. Once everything has roughly come together, place the mass of dough onto the parchment paper and slightly flatten it into a rectangle mimicking the shape of the baking tray, about 2 inches thick. Use a knife to cut the dough into 6 triangles. They may or may not be equal in size. Keep it rustic, right? Place the tray into the preheated oven and bake it for 25 minutes, or until you see the tops go slightly golden-brown. While the scones are baking, make the icing by whisking the icing sugar and milk with a fork in a bowl.

 

Once the scones have fully baked, leave them to cool for 10 minutes before drizzling on the glaze. These are best eaten once straight out of the oven, but they can be stored for up to 3 days in an airtight container.

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