Best simple cookies ever!!

[appels]

Alright a very simple recipe and extremely nice to make with your kids (or the neighbours kids, or your gran, or anyone who likes cookies... and, well, who doesn't?)

For the dough: Makes enough cookies to fill the oven twice..

400 grams of flour
300 grams of butter
200 grams of sugar

1 raw egg mixed with a fork

(for the brits/americans: If you don't do the metric system just remember the ratio flour/butter/sugar is 4/3/2 parts)

Make the dough with the flour, butter and sugar. Just put it all together and kneed until you got a big ball of dough. Cool for half an hour in the fridge.

Wash your hands with cold water and dry well. You handle dough best with cool hands because then it won't stick to your fingers so much.

Take a wooden or glass kitchen-board and spread a thin layer of flour over it. This prevents the dough from sticking to your surface or roller.

Flatten the dough with a roller or a clean wine bottle or something. Until it is about 3mm thick (10th of an inch or something)

Cut out your cookie-shapes, give them a diameter of about 5cm (2 inch). It doesn't really matter what shape you make them (let the kids go crazy), but don't make them too big.

Spread some of the egg-mixture on top. Just dab a thin layer on top with your (clean!) fingers, or a brush. This will give the cookies a nice glossy topping.

Put them on baking paper in the middle of a pre-heated oven of 180 degrees celcius. Bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown.

Cool down for half an hour. Bon appetite!!

Now the cool thing about this recipe is that you can mix in everything with the dough: nuts, raisins, chocolate, muesli-mix, ginger, apple, a little bit of honey... whatever you like. A combination of a little bit of ginger and a teaspoon of cinnamon is my favorite.

[Glaukos3]

Fantastic - when can you deliver the first batch to my house ???

Actually I think even I could attempt this recipe. Tell me appels to make chocolate cookies what sort of chocolate do I need and in what form do I need to buy it in. If thats going to be too complicated for me are chocolate chip cookies easier to make.

[appels]

It's very easy Glaukos, just try... ingredients are cheap anyway.. so you can mess up.. lol.

You can buy special cooking chocolate if you want to go all fancy. But just chopped up chocolate bars (pure/milk/ white/whatever) work well too, especially mixed with some crunched nuts.

They aren't in the oven that long... so your chocolate won't burn.

[Muban]

Have another cookie recipe:

Makes about 25-30

Ingredients
100g rolled oats or oatmeal
125g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
50g bar chocolate chopped
100g butter at room temp
100g soft dark brown sugar
100g caster sugar
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
115g choc chips

Preheat oven to 190ºc
Blend the oats so they are finer in a food processor. Pour the dry ingredients into a bowl (oats, flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda, salt, chocolate) and stir to combine.
In another bowl cream together the butter and sugars.
Beat the vanilla essence and egg in a cup, then beat into the sugar/butter mixture.
Add the dry ingredients and choc chips and mix thoroughly.
Roll into balls the size of ping pong balls and place 2" apart on a greased baking tray (don't flatten them).
Bake for 10 mins. They should be golden in colour but still look a little underdone - this is what gives them their lovely chewy soft texture.

These are great with chocolate in them but have sometimes substituted the chocolate for dried fruit (ready to eat sultanas/apricots) and they taste great too.

[stephen smerdon]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm