Stolen Chocolate Cookies

These cookies should come with a health warning. Not so much because of the chocolate they contain - although there is an excellent chocolate-to-crumb ratio - but because they can be ready in less than half an hour. That is less than half an hour between deciding you want a chocolate cookie and having a dozen eleven cooling on a rack and one in your mouth.

The recipe is courtesy of Luisa from The Wednesday Chef: Sherry Yard's Quintessentially Chocolate Cookies. They caught my eye when first posted but I, ahem, came across some chocolate recently which made my baking of them a fait accompli.

You see, the thing is, we went to this jazz concert, right? And in the bar they had buckets of samples of the new New Tree chocolate flavour. Ginger. A lovely dark chocolate which dominates up front, followed by the subtle heat of ginger, which lingers a little bit longer than one might expect, which may be intentional as it makes you want to take another bite of the chocolate to balance it out, which leads to the ginger taste again, which leads to... There were lots of samples and nobody seemed to be interested in them, so I liberated some. And when I got back, I thought that I might have enough to make something, rather than just eat them all. Lo and behold, I had exactly four ounces. Enough to make a dozen!

The brown sugar really adds something here, giving a gorgeous carmelly flavour to the crumb. I think Sherry Yard has created my new favourite chocolate cake, and with a recipe this simple and this quick, I know I will be making them time and again. It isn't necessary for you to use ginger chocolate or stolen chocolate at all, but a good dark chocolate will reward you - the chunks are meant to be large, you will get a bite full of chocolate more often than a bite full of cookie, so use something you'd like to eat au naturale. I've made the recipe several times now, after the initial STOLEN version, and I find that I like the larger cookie (i.e. making a dozen from the below quantities) as you get a lovely crispy edge, plenty of chocolate, and soft cookie in the middle. The smaller cookies are probably better for the waistline, but they are biscuits not cookies, if you see what I mean, crisp and crumbly all the way through.

Chocolate Cookies

Recipe adapted from Sherry Yard, via Luisa Weiss. Makes one dozen large cookies or two dozen little ones.

- 6.5 oz self-raising flour
- 2 oz butter
- 2 oz light brown muscavado sugar
- 1 medium egg
- 4 oz good dark chocolate, cut into large chunks (i.e. not chocolate chips)

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the egg, and then the flour.

3. Turn off the electric mixer, and stir the chocolate pieces into the batter.

4. Spoon heaped teaspoons of the mixture onto the baking parchment, not too close together.

5. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until golden brown.

6. Slide the parchment off the baking tray and onto a cooling rack. Leave to cool for 5 minutes or so before removing them from the parchment, so that they can firm up. If you try to peel them off the paper as soon as they come out of the oven they are liable to break.

Stored in an airtight container, they will apparently last for a few days, but thus far we haven't managed to keep any past the second day. They go down very well with a nice cup of tea (if you're English) or coffee (if you're Dutch).

A Lemon Polenta Birthday Cake

In previous years, the Dutchman has requested carrot cake and chocolate-coconut cake for his birthday cakes. This year he broke the run of 'c' related choices with a request for lemon polenta cake, inspired by a cake we shared recently at Borough Market. It was also, I think, another attempt at edible sunshine - a moist burst of citrus and sweetness.

I turned, of course, to Nigel Slater. Lo and behold, there's a recipe in the Guardian! Good job, Nigel! I made mine purely lemon-scented, rather than orange and lemon, as the original recipe calls for. He also includes chopped almonds as well as ground, but as I was trying to recreate something else, I left these out. (And I put in a fair bit more limoncello in the syrup as well...) The result was a rich yellow cake spiked with a nice amount of syrup without being too moist. It went excellently with crème fraiche, on a lazy afternoon. It was more of a pudding type of bake than what I would call a birthday cake, but it went down well with the birthday boy and that's what matters. Next time, I might try using other citrus, following the Slater recipe properly, or I might go for the delicious-sounding Spiced Sumac Polenta Cake, posted, in a wonderful coincidence, on the Dutchman's birthday itself!

Lemon Polenta Cake

Adapted from Nigel Slater. Serves 8.

- 210g butter
- 210g caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 150g ground almonds
- 150g fine polenta
- 1tsp baking powder
- zest and juice of a large lemon
- syrup: zest and juice of a large lemon; 100g sugar, 4tbsp limoncello

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line a 20cm cake tin. (Nigel says springform, but I didn't have one and the cake released perfectly.)
2. Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, and then add the eggs, ground almonds, baking powder, and lemon (zest and juice) mixing until smooth.
3.  Now add the polenta, and mix briefly until combined.
4. Spoon the mix into the tin, and bake for 20 minutes at 180°C, then for a further 30 minutes at 160°C. The cake is done when a skewer comes out clean. Nigel Slater gives the very helpful hint that one can cover the cake with tin foil if the top is browning too much.
5. Leave the cake in the tin to cool whilst making the syrup. Squeeze the lemon into a measuring jug, add the limoncello, and then top up this liquid to 250ml. Heat the liquid in a saucepan and add the sugar. Boil this mixture until the sugar is dissolved and reduced to about half. Spike the cake all over and pour the hot syrup over it. Leave in the tin until cool, and then EAT!

Delhaize Dinner

In an attempt to revive my quite frankly lacklustre French skills, I have decided to try and cook at least two dishes from the supermarket magazine every month. The current rentrée edition includes ideas for exciting packed lunches (draw faces on quiches) and an article on that cool new trendy foodstuff, the crumble.

The results? Well, I think my kitchen French came through for me, although how much of it was actual textual comprehension and how much of it was looking at the pictures and basic reasoning I don't know.

I intended to make the rosemary chicken skewers, but lacked one vital element: the skewers. Instead I fried off chicken pieces with onion and rosemary, which was perfectly pleasant but nothing special or particularly complicated to write more about. To accompany this, I went for green beans (the Dutchman's favourite) and a spinach and chickpea warm salad/side dish/thing. There were two elements of this (recipe below) which made it stand out. First, the chickpeas are flavoured as they cook by the additions to the water. This is a simple idea which I'd never heard of before - ok, yes, you add chickpeas to stews and so on, but just plain boiled chickpeas? It added a little something. In this instance the flavourings were garlic and bay, but I think they could be played around with: lemon and thyme; garlic and sage; white pepper and basil? And that's not even considering the flavourings of the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Levantine traditions of chickpea wizardry. The second element was the vinaigrette. Very simple, just oil and vinegar, but I think it brightened and lifted the spinach.

And now to the good stuff. Those process and food porn shots at the top of the page? That's a salted caramel and apple compote. OH YIS. Very easy to make and very easy to eat. It was part of an article in the Delhaize magazine which included a blackberry and cuberdon compote. Cuberdons are a Belgian sweet sort of like a jelly baby with a liquid centre. They are incredibly sweet and are one of those things which taste amazing at the first bite and then rapidly fill you with sugar and regret. Probably won't be trying that one... But! Salted caramel and apple! That totally counts as one of your five a day, right? It is made from fruit! We ate it warm, poured over a slice of plain vanilla sponge, accompanied by crème fraîche. (I may also have eaten it straight from the pot. Ahem.) Although I think there is something in the apple's cooking juices which lengthens the sauce, and stops the caramel from hardening, the photo above makes the caramel look a lot thinner than it was. I think this tastes like it was a lot more effort - three ingredients, plus water, and ready in under half an hour.

Ragout De Pois Chiches Aux Epinards

Recipe adapted from the August/September Delhaize magazine. For two.

- 125g tinned chickpeas
- 1 spring onion
- 250g spinach leaves
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tbsp vinegar (original recipe called for sherry; we had red wine)
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 clove garlic
- olive oil, salt and pepper to taste
(the original recipe also called for 100g soft goat's cheese to crumble over the top, which we didn't do but I would definitely try another time)

1. Simmer the chickpeas in water flavoured with the garlic and bay leaf (for cooking times use tin instructions). When cooked, drain and place in a bowl.
2. Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan and add the spinach leaves - you will probably need to do this in batches, waiting for the first to wilt a little before adding the next. Mince the spring onion and add it to the pan. Cook together on a low heat for a few minutes.
3. Prepare the vinaigrette by whisking together the oil and vinegar.
4. Combine everything and serve!

Compote De Pomme Au Caramel Au Berre Salé

Recipe adapted from the August/September Delhaize magazine. Makes one pot, or enough as part of dessert for four people.

- 500g Cox apples
- 100g caster sugar
- 20g and 30g salted butter
- vanilla pod

1. Peel the apples and cut into small dice. Melt 20g of salted butter in a saucepan, add the split vanilla pod, and lightly stew the apples for about fifteen minutes, or until they reach a consistency you like - I've made it with apple pieces that still had a bit of crunch and with pears which went from rock hard to deliciously slumped in the blink of an eye.
2. Whilst the apples are cooking, make the caramel. In a (heavy-based) saucepan (with quite tall sides) melt the sugar into 2 tbsp water (about 20 ml). Once the sugar has melted completely, watch the liquid until it turns a 'caramel' colour. The darker it is, the more intense the flavour, but be careful as it can go from golden brown to burnt very easily... Take the pan off the heat and add the 30g butter, whisking it in. This is where the 'pan with tall sides' caveat comes in: the caramel will bubble up when you add the butter. It will be HOT so please be careful. Salted caramel is a glorious thing, I don't want anyone to have to go to casualty before getting to taste it. (Incidentally, if you are as much of a fan of salted caramel as I am, check out David Lebovitz - both this recipe and the other links beneath it.)
3. Add the caramel sauce to the apples and mix together. Serve either warm or cold. Or keep it all for yourself.