Perfect American style cookies any flavour you want

Makes 3 large trays full (about 20 cookies)

The basic recipe:

• 225g/8oz butter
• 225g/8oz caster sugar
• 170g condensed milk (tubes of this size can be bought, or just measure this amount out from the tin)
• 350g/12oz self raising flour

This recipe could not be easier:

1. cream butter and sugar
2. add condensed milk
3. add sifted flour, mix to make a soft dough
4. add extras
5. shape and bake: pull off golf ball sized pieces of the dough and place on a greased baking try, there is no need to flatten them.
6. 180 degrees C/gas mark 4 for 15 minutes (keep and eye on them towards to end so that they don't brown too much

The cookies will be too soft to move when the are straight out of the oven, and you may think that they aren't cooked enough, but they are meant to be soft and lightly golden.

leave the cookies on the tray for 5 minutes before moving them to a cooling rack.

This cookie dough can be kept in the fridge for up to 3 days, to do this gently roll our the cookie dough into 2 sausages and wrap in cling film, when you are ready to bake you can just slice off the cookies and place onto greased baking trays. These cling filmed sausages of cookie dough can also be frozen.

Variations:

• Chocolate chips: 

Add 100g/4oz of chocolate chips (dark, milk or white) to the basic recipe after the flour

• Chocolate and nut:

Add 100g/4oz of chocolate chips and 100g/4oz of chopped nuts (any will work) to the basic recipe after the flour.

• White chocolate and raspberry:

Add 100g/4oz of white chocolate chips to the basic cookie dough recipe after the flour. Add 100g/4oz of chopped fresh or dried raspberry after you have made your golf ball shapes out of the dough and squash the raspberry pieces into them (if you mix the raspberries into the dough they turn to mush and the dough goes pink).

• Double chocolate cookies

Replace 1 tbsp of the flour with 1 tbsp of cocoa and add 100g/4oz of chocolate chips.

• Oat and raisin cookies:

Replace 100g/4oz of the flour with porridge oats and add 1 tsp of cinnamon. Also add 1oog/4oz of raisins.


As I'm sure you can see this recipe can be adapted endlessly, m and m's, smarties, dried fruit, types of chocolate, crystallised ginger the list goes on.
Why not let me know what variations you have tried!
Happy cooking
xoxo

slow cooker curried cauliflower

This is a wonderful way to cook cauliflower and makes a great addition to a curry night, it doesn't have a sauce but isn't dry. I often cook this and the kids seem to love it as well as the adults. surprisingly if you time it right the cauliflower still has some crunch, which is how I like it.

• 1 head of cauliflower 
• 100g of tinned chopped tomatoes
• 1 onion 
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp cumin
• 4 garlic cloves
• 1 inch of ginger
• 1 tsp of chili powder (this is a medium heat, you can use fresh or change amount for your preference)
• salt to taste

Heat a little vegetable oil in a frying pan and add sliced onion.
Once the onion has begun to soften add the mustard seeds.
After a minute add the garlic, ginger, and powered spices.
Fry for a few minutes add the chopped tomato, chili and salt
Put this in the slow cooker then add the cauliflower in florets.
Cook for 2 hours on high, check the cauliflower is cooked to your taste and serve.

I will add a photo soon
Happy cooking
xoxo

slow cooker spaghetti bolognese

Spaghetti Bolognese:

•  500g beef mince or half and half pork and beef
• 2 rashers of bacon
• 1 onion
• 2 large carrots
• 1 stick of celery
• 1 courgette (optional) 
• 100g mushrooms (optional)
• 3 cloves of garlic (or more if you like it)
• 1 tsp of Italian dried herbs
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 beef stock cube
• 1 tbsp of tomato puree
• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
• 1 glass of wine (optional)

Method:

• I browned off the mince in a frying pan and moved into the slow cooker pot.
• Pouring off any excess fat from the pan, I fried the onion, celery and carrot until softened.
• Then add the chopped garlic and herbs and fry for 1 minute until fragrant, stir in the tomato puree and then pour in the wine, let that sizzle for a minute then put everything in the pan in the slow cooker.
• Crumble the stock cube into the slow cooker.
• add any other vegetables that you like in your bolognese and pour in the 2 tins of tomatoes.
• give it a good stir up, put the lid on and leave to cook

4 hours on high or 6 hours in low.

This made a really lovely rich pasta sauce, with very tender meat. I recommend trying this recipe because of the depth of flavour and that fact that you can walk away and get on with life!

Happy cooking
xoxo 

Chicken stock in the slow cooker

Chicken stock:

• bones from the cooked and stripped chicken
• a carrot
• a celery stick
• an onion
• a bay leaf
• pepper corns

I placed everything in the slow cooker, covered all the ingredients in water and switched on the the slow cooker and went to bed.

In the morning I strained the stock to remove all the pieces and froze the stock in ice cream containers.

Top Tip

Sometimes when I make stock I reduce the liquid down so that it is about a third of the original amount, I leave it to cool and pour it into ice cube trays and then freeze, that way when you need stock you can drop a cube into a dish that you are cooking, just like you could with a shop bought stock cube.

This recipe can be adapted with any flavours and spices, bones from other meats can be used, different combinations of vegetables and different flavour palettes (e.g ginger, garlic and soy to make a Chinese style stock).

Happy baking
xoxo

slow cooker chicken

Slow cooker chicken:

• 1 whole chicken
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 lemon
• salt and pepper

The first thing I did in my slow cooker was a chicken.

• I stuffed garlic under the skin and shoved a lemon in the cavity, then placed the whole chicken in the slow cooker pot (it was a tight fit) 
• I added salt and pepper then switched it on, no liquid added! 

Four hours later with the slow cooker on high I had a beautifully moist cooked chicken. The skin was not crispy like a roast and looked a lot less appealing, so I removed this an saved it for the stock pot. apparently there is a lot of fat in the skin so maybe its a good thing that we didn't eat it.
There was a lot of juice in the bottom which contained the fat the came out of the chicken I poured it into a fat separating jug and left it to settle so that I could easily discard the fat and be left with the cooking juices for gravies or stocks. You can save this fat to roast potatoes or vegetables in.

I served the chicken with veg, potatoes and gravy on the first night. The next day the OH had chicken sandwiches for a pack-up (which he told me the chicken was really moist still), and I froze the remaining chicken for another day. 

This recipe, like most slow cooker recipes can be easily adapted and I recommend experimenting. If there is a certain recipe/flavours that you would use to do a normal roast chicken, try that. 

Happy baking

xoxo

In love with my slow cooker

For Christmas I was given a slow and immediately fell in love. I used it so many times in the first week of owning it, and had to freeze lots of meals because we couldn't eat it all!
It seems the best plan when cooking in a slow cooker it to add very little liquid as it doesn't loose any during the cooking process, so adding too much will just mean you will have to thicken or reduce at the end of the process.
Cooking dishes this way seems to really benefit the flavours, giving spices and herbs time to develop and almost marinade the food as it cooks so slowly. Stews and casseroles are a favourite for slow cooking but curries come out brilliantly, I in fact often do a curry a day or so before I want to eat it so that I can chill the dish and really let the flavours develop.
The timings with slow cooking are mostly 4 hours or high or 6 hours on low. Obviously you should check that chicken or pork is cooked all the way through before eating, or if you think the meat is not tender enough just cook for a longer time.
If you are leaving the house for longer than 6 hours (I am out longer than this on a work day) slow cookers don't have a delay timer, but I use a generic timer to delay the start time to my cooking. This would have to be done with caution and consideration of how long the food will be in the slow cooker, out of the fridge but not switched on and cooking. I only do this in the winter and only for a short time delay (no more the 3 or 4 hours).
The slow cooker can be preheated to speed things along, by just switching it on whilst you brown, chop, saute and prepare your ingredients. Some recipes benefit from starting off in a frying pan then transferring into the slow cooker. Some recipes you can just chuck everything in and switch it on. Some recipes also work well by starting off on high for 1 hour and then turning down to low for the remaining cooking time. 
Lifting the lid of your slow cooker lets out a lot of the built up heat and can add 20 minutes onto the cooking time so its best to try and resist peeking in all the time, This for me was impossible when I first bought it!

I will post some slow cooker recipes soon

happy cooking

xoxo

First try at croissants

First try at croissants
I am a keen baker, and in recent years I have gotten really into bread baking, trying many recipes, experimenting and best of all eating lovely bread. For me cooking is a great way to unwind, and I often spend my weekend cooking up a storm. Always keen to try out a new recipe my attention was grabbed by a post on www.thefreshloaf.com about laminated yeast doughs.

The recipe I used:
600g bread flour
8g salt
30 g milk powder
36g fresh, 12g dried yeast
378g cold water
250g butter (for folds)

The key with this recipe seems to be keep it cold, so work on it in short bursts then put back in the fridge, in my experience the slower a dough rises and develops the tastier it is with most bread recipes, and with the high butter content in this one, keeping it cool and stopping it from melting is important.
This recipe can be prepared almost to completion, refrigerated over night and finished and bake in the morning.

• Make the dough: I used dried yeast and sprinkled onto the water in a jug to 'refresh' it whilst I weighed everything else out. I placed all the ingredients except the butter into my kenwood chef and used the dough hook for about 10 minutes.
• Chill the dough: I cling filmed the bowl and placed in the fridge for 30 minutes.
• To prepare the butter for the laminating process there are two ways, 1) is to slice the block of butter straight from the fridge so its cold, into 4mm slices and place in the fridge until ready to use. 2) Place the block of butter between two sheets of grease proof papper or cling film and using a rolling pin, beat and bash it out into one large flat slice, this will also need to be kept in the fridge until you need to use it.
• Next roll out the dough into a large rectangle using flour to stop it sticking to the table and pin. Try to keep the edges straight as this makes the folding process easier. I rolled my dough out to roughly 2'x1' to a thickness of between 5 and 10mm
• Put the butter onto two thirds of the dough sheet, either place the whole sheet on top or lay the smaller pieces on so that they touch (or as close as they will go whilst being spread out enough to cover the whole area). The same technique as when making puff pastry, if this has confused you, this website www.bakeinfo.co.nz/Facts/Pastry/Puff-pastry explains it really well.
• Now to do the first tri fold, take the third of dough that has no butter on it and fold over and cover the middle third which has butter on. Then take the last third and and fold it onto the other two thirds, once again this website www.bakeinfo.co.nz/Facts/Pastry/Puff-pastry explains this process brilliantly. 
• Half turn: imagine the dough is a clock, pick it up and twelve and six and turn it so that 12 moves to 3 and 6 moves to 9, this is called a half turn.
• Roll out the dough in the new position into the large rectangle as before. 
• Do another tri fold, then place the dough in the fridge for another half an hour.
• Do another 2 tri folds with a half turn in between and chill. 
• A this point you can leave the dough in the fridge over night or just wait 30 minutes.

roll the dough out one last time, then cut into triangles

I cut it into squares then in half into triangles, this shape was not quite right to do the final roll so i am going to experiment with the cutting a little bit and get that right next time i make croissants.

• Leave the triangles for about 5 minutes to rest, they can be stacked up, but no more than 5 or 6 per pile, I covered them with cling film to stop them from drying out.
• Stretch and roll: pick up a triangle, and pull gently to stretch it out length ways (this gives more wraps around when rolling, giving it a better look). Then roll from the base to the triangle all the way to the tip. place of a baking tray (I used not stick mats which are amazing, but you can just grease the tray) and curve the ends towards each other to make a crescent shape. 

• Leave them to rise, my recipe said 40 minutes, but I feel this was not long enough, and will try a longer rise time in the future.
• Egg wash the croissants and bake in the oven for 12-15 at 230 degrees C

I tried leaving one croissant straight and not crescent shaped to see how it would look.

In my opinion this recipe was easier than I expected, and involved less rolling and folding than i thought it would, I think these were successful, they had great layers from the butter and folds, and a lovely flaky crispy crust, with soft insides. I will try a longer rise before baking and see how this changes them. 

all the best

rachie

Update
As promised I tried this recipe again, but with a longer final prove. The results were much better with a lighter pastry as a result!

Whilst eating one, I thought you may like to see the layers:

Happy cooking

xoxo