Archive for June, 2011

Tasty Tasty Cookie Times

These cookies are awesome, the basic recipe is pretty versatile and they’re really easy to make. When baking with my friends, these cookies are the go-to thing as they’re difficult to get wrong and reliably produce good results. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a recipe for cookies which doesn’t make them too cakey or too crunchy, but these have the whole crispy/chewy/gooey thing going on. They came from here originally but I’ve changed it a bit.
Ingredients
• 350g unsifted plain flour
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 225g/8oz butter
• 175g/6¼oz caster sugar
• 175g/6¼oz soft brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 350g/12¼oz dark chocolate
For variation add 120g each of dark, white and milk chocolate instead of 350g dark, and/or replace 10g flour with 40g cocoa powder, and/or 100g chopped nuts. All are good.
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 190C/375F/Gas 5.
2. Chop the chocolate the same way as for the brownies – with a sharp knife, chop across the chocolate with the full blade, then turn the board and do the same the other way till you have cubes. Don’t use chocolate chips as they melt funny, and the lumps of chocolate are just nicer – you miss out on the fun of getting an awesome cookie which has more chocolate in it than dough.
3. In a bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, cocoa powder if you’re using it, and salt – it feels weird to not sift the flour first, but I think it stops the cookies from rising so much or something.
4. In another bowl, combine the butter, sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract until creamy – though it’s more labour intensive, using a hand whisk works better on this one. Beat in the eggs, then gradually beat in the flour mixture. Stir in the chocolate/any other fillings. The dough should be quite sticky, but it also ought to be able to hold together.
5. Split the pliable dough into two halves, rolling each out into sausage shapes, approximately 5cm/2in in diameter. Wrap them in cling film and transfer to the refrigerator until ready to use. This helps to get the nice cookie shapes, as the dough is more likely to stick to your fingers than the baking tray if you don’t cool it down in the fridge for an hour or so. If you’re in a rush though, it’s not compulsory.
6. When you are ready to bake the cookies, simply cut the log into slices 2cm/¾in thick and lay on a baking tray, widely spaced apart. Bake for 9-11 minutes.

2011
06/29
CATEGORY
Food
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The Student’s Bookshelf Presents: ‘Dark Matter’

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver is a very good ghost story.  The characters and the relationships between them are both believable and interesting, the writing arresting and succinct, and despite conforming to most ghost story conventions it also manages largely to avoid cliché.  Paver maintains and builds tension really well, and the spooky bits have immediate hair-raising impact, but also stay with you; ‘flensing’ is my new least favourite word, and a certain sound described in the novel now fills me with horror.

Jack is a deeply unhappy man who is given the chance to fulfil a lifelong dream to travel to the Arctic, as the wireless operator for a group of surveyors. After a few hiccups, the expedition starts promisingly, despite the reluctance of locals to help them get to the site the group had selected.  However, as the sun rises less high in the sky every day and the total darkness of winter looms, a series of unfortunate events leads Jack to be left alone at the site for what could be months.  The days get shorter and shorter, and eventually disappear altogether, and what in the light were suspicions that the group were not alone becomes a conviction.

Dark Matter does follow the classic pattern of a ghost story.  Unless you’re entirely new to the genre, if you are after a twisty and surprising plot, this book is not going to give you what you want. In its defence, the situation in which she puts her protagonist is pretty original and utterly appalling – I will never look at the far north in the same way again.  That the scenario itself manages to be terrifying without veering from ghost story into a more general horror story is a credit to the writer. Furthermore, the stark simplicity of the plot has a grace which reflects the characters’ icy surroundings – an overly complicated storyline simply wouldn’t suit the setting.  It’s utterly gripping; I found myself genuinely dithering over whether to read it in bed because I wanted to race through to the end, or to leave it because when I finished reading I would be left alone in the dark.  If you find it, it really is worth a read.

 

2011
06/07
CATEGORY
Books
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The Student’s Bookshelf Presents: ‘The Way of Shadows’

In the perpetually invaded kingdom of Cenaria, ruled more effectively by the Sa’Kage – the criminal underworld run by nine crime lords – than by its petulant and foolish king, a small boy seeks to escape the slums by becoming apprenticed to the finest killer in the land, and thus Brent Weeks’ first novel, The Way of Shadows, shoots off at lightning speeds.  Durzo Blint, the most famous wetboy  (an assassin with magic awesome sprinkles) in the kingdom is conflicted, dark, and pretty funny for a legend.  After reluctantly accepting Azoth into his tutelage, he trains the boy, giving him a new identity and new skills.  But anyone who’s watched a film about people going into witness protection will know that fresh identities never stick, especially if you’ve managed to accrue enough emotional baggage as Azoth did in his first eleven years.  Plot twists ensue.  Add to this courtly intrigues; the constant threat of invasion; and Durzo flitting about the place being enigmatic and morally ambiguous and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty good novel.

The plot is twisty enough that the reader is kept guessing, but it doesn’t cheat us of the fun of calling it correctly by being impossibly complicated.  Equally, the characters are pretty convincing and fun to read, and Weeks is sufficiently horrible to them that I genuinely worried for their safety, but not so needlessly cruel that I lost all hope or interest in them.  A slight quibble was the gratuitous use of swearwords; though I’m by no means averse to the odd curse, I found such earthy language used so often in a clearly carefully constructed, decidedly unEarthly world distracting.  However, I know others who have read the book who found the speech and swearing reassuringly authentic where I found it immersion-breaking, so it’s an arguable matter.  In the book’s favour, it’s very well-written, especially for a fantasy novel, a genre where lots of authors seem to abandon quality of writing in favour of dragons (Terry Goodkind, I’m looking at you).  Furthermore, The Way of Shadows is the first part of a trilogy, and all three volumes have already been released! Happy days.  I’m genuinely looking forward to picking up Shadow’s Edge and seeing what has become of Azoth and his damaged, damaged friends.

2011
06/05
CATEGORY
Books
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Superawesome Brownies of Win

These fudgy triple chocolate brownies are pretty good, if I do say so myself.  They’re fairly easy to make, especially if you have an electric whisk/mixer.  If you don’t, you can still have tasty, tasty brownies but it’ll mean about three quarters of an hour of whisking the eggs by hand every time you want them.  The original recipe is here but I’ve changed it a touch.  Enjoy!

Preparation time: 30mins-1hr 30mins depending on mixer

Cooking time: 25 mins

Ingredients

  • 185g unsalted butter
  • 185g best dark chocolate plus 50g for chunks
  • 85g plain flour
  • 40g cocoa powder
  • 50g white chocolate
  • 50g milk chocolate
  • 3 large eggs
  • 275g golden caster sugar

Method

  1. Cut the butter into smallish cubes and tip into a medium bowl. Break the dark chocolate into small pieces and drop into the bowl. Fill a small saucepan about a quarter full with hot water, then sit the bowl on top so it rests on the rim of the pan, not touching the water. Put over a low heat until the butter and chocolate have melted, stirring occasionally to mix them. Now remove the bowl from the pan. Alternatively, cover the bowl loosely with cling film and put in the microwave for 2 minutes on High. Leave the melted mixture to cool to room temperature.
  2. While you wait for the chocolate to cool, position a shelf in the middle of your oven and turn the oven on to fan 160C/conventional180C/gas 4 (most ovens take 10-15 minutes to heat up). Using a shallow 20cm square tin, cut out a square of non-stick baking parchment to line the base. Now tip the flour and cocoa powder into a sieve held over a medium bowl, and tap and shake the sieve so they run through together and you get rid of any lumps.
  3. With a large sharp knife, chop the white, dark and milk chocolate into chunks on a board. The slabs of chocolate will be quite hard, so the safest way to do this is to hold the knife over the chocolate and press the tip down on the board, then bring the rest of the blade down across the chocolate. Keep on doing this, moving the knife across the chocolate to chop it into pieces, then turn the board round 90 degrees and again work across the chocolate so you end up with rough squares.
  4. Break the eggs into a large bowl and tip in the sugar. With an electric mixer on maximum speed, whisk the eggs and sugar until they look thick and creamy, like a milk shake. This can take 3-8 minutes, depending on how powerful your mixer is, so don’t lose heart. You’ll know it’s ready when the mixture becomes really pale and about double its original volume. Another check is to turn off the mixer, lift out the beaters and wiggle them from side to side. If the mixture that runs off the beaters leaves a trail on the surface of the mixture in the bowl for a second or two, you’re there.  If you don’t have an electric whisk, a really good hand whisking to get the consistency as close to the above as possible doesn’t hurt the end result.
  5. Pour the cooled chocolate mixture over the eggy mousse, then gently fold together with a rubber spatula. Plunge the spatula in at one side, take it underneath and bring it up the opposite side and in again at the middle. Continue going under and over in a figure of eight, moving the bowl round after each folding so you can get at it from all sides, until the two mixtures are one and the colour is a mottled dark brown. The idea is to marry them without knocking out the air, so be as gentle and slow as you like – you don’t want to undo all the work you did in step 4.
  6. Hold the sieve over the bowl of eggy chocolate mixture and resift the cocoa and flour mixture, shaking the sieve from side to side, to cover the top evenly. Gently fold in this powder using the same figure of eight action as before. The mixture will look dry and dusty at first, and a bit unpromising, but if you keep going very gently and patiently, it will end up looking gungy and fudgy. Stop just before you feel you should, as you don’t want to overdo this mixing. Finally, stir in the chocolate chunks until they’re dotted throughout. Now your mixing is done and the oven can take over.
  7. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, scraping every bit out of the bowl with the spatula. Gently ease the mixture into the corners of the tin and paddle the spatula from side to side across the top to level it. Put in the oven and set your timer for 25 minutes. When the buzzer goes, open the oven, pull the shelf out a bit and gently shake the tin. If the brownie wobbles in the middle, it’s not quite done, so slide it back in and bake for another 5 minutes until the top has a shiny, papery crust and the sides are just beginning to come away from the tin. Take out of the oven.
  8. Leave the whole thing in the tin until completely cold, then, if you’re using the brownie tin, lift up the protruding rim slightly and slide the uncut brownie out on its base. If you’re using a normal tin, lift out the brownie with the foil. Cut into quarters, then cut each quarter into four squares and finally into triangles.  If you’re anything like me and my friends, though, just cutting chunks straight out of the tin is the way forward…These brownies are so addictive you’ll want to make a second batch before the first is finished, but if you want to make some to hide away for a special occasion, it’s useful to know that they’ll keep in an airtight container for a good two weeks and in the freezer for up to a month.

 

 

2011
06/01
CATEGORY
Food
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