I have a thing about peanut butter at the moment, and cookies! This is a standard cookie recipe but with peanut butter and banana, I used some dark muscovado sugar which made them rather rich but lovely. It’s essential that these cookies remain soft in the middle so 10 minutes seems to be the maximum time in the oven but ovens vary. They just need to be golden on the edges.

Ingredients:
125g unsalted butter
100g unrefined granulated sugar
75g dark muscovado sugar
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla extract
150g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
100g crunchy peanut butter
1 ripe banana, mashed
50g rolled oats (approximate)

Melt the butter and pour over the two sugars, beat in the egg and vanilla. Add the other ingredients and beat well. You may want to adjust the amount of peanut butter or the oats depending on the thickness of the mixture. I played it a bit by ear. The banana adds moisture and the oats take it away, so just make sure it’s no too stiff.

Dollop dessert spoonfuls of  the mixture onto baking trays lined with greaseproof paper, well spaced apart. Place in a 190 degree oven for about 10 minutes. Leave to cool on the trays until hardened a little before turning them onto a wire rack. Enjoy with tea, but especially coffee I find.

The taste of these isn’t exactly anything to write home about, but hey, the look is fun. Though not so fun that it would justify doing this recipe a lot, as the dough handling is a tad convoluted.

So anyway, you make two dough mixes, for the light and the dark.

Light dough:
Sift together 175g plain flour with 1/4 t baking soda, pinch of salt, 1 tsp ground cinnamon and 1 tsp ground ginger.
Rub in 65g unsalted butter, until it resembles crumbs.
Stir in 75g caster sugar, 2 T maple syrup, and one beaten egg yolk.
Bring dough together, knead briefly, then wrap in cling film and chill for 30 mins. (The dough, not you.)

Dark dough:
Sift together 175g plain flour, 1/2 t baking soda, pinch salt, 2 t mixed spice, 1 t ground ginger and 25g cocoa.
Rub in 75g unsalted butter, until it resembles crumbs.
Stir in 75g light muscovado sugar, one beaten egg.
Bring dough together, knead briefly, then wrap in cling film and chill for 30 mins.

The assembly involves dividing both doughs in half.

Roll out half of each dough in a rectangle 28x4cm, then slice each of these, long ways, into 7 strips.
Lay the strips side by side, alternating between light and dark.
Roll the other half of the light dough into a sausage shape, 28cm long, then place this in the centre of the stripey rectangle you just created (long-ways – it’s the middle of a tube basically).
Roll up the stripes around the sausage, to make a stripey tube.
Roll out the remaining dark dough into another rectangle 28 x 15cm… ish – the latter figure might need to be bigger. Basically, this is to enclose the tube with a kinda dark sheath.
Tighten up with a bit of rolling, then wrap and chill for another 30 mins. (Insert same gag if required.)

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease a few baking sheets.

Slice the dough into discs around 8mm thick.

Bake for 12-15 mins, until starting to colour.

Leave on the tray to firm up for a few mins, then cool on racks.

Another Dan Lepard recipe from the Guardian. Find it here.

These are very handsome, tasty cookies. Not the usual massive monsters I make. Dan L says “place round, teaspoon-sized balls” on the baking sheets, but I just got teaspoon fulls and rolled them between my palms to the size of a small walnut in an effort to achieve some sort of regularity of size.

The dominant flavour here is from muscovado sugar and black treacle (or molasses – TBH, I’m not sure I could tell the two apart if I ate a spoonful of each in a blind test), along with a slight saltiness from the peanuts. The recipe also includes some lemon zest, which Dan L says “brightens the flavour on first bite”, but I find it also stays on the palette pleasantly.

I’m not sure about the inclusion of a tablespoon of cocoa though. He says it helps “to push the aftertaste towards chocolate”, but is it really necessary? The flavours of unrefined sugar and peanut are quite dominant,  and cocoa is arguably overcomplicating it. Plus, if I want my cookies to taste of chocolate, I’ll make chocolate cookies. But hey, that’s just me. Oh, and I knocked back the sugar a bit too.

My fellow baking enthusiast at work, Ms Hannah Mearns, lent me The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf.

I made these. They were delicious. I ordered the book from Amazon. Home Delivery Network were crap… and I’ve still not got it! I want to make some more goodies from it. Among other things, I want to make both its chocolate cupcake and its chocolate muffin recipes, to indulge in the never-ending debate about what distinguishes the two.

Anyway, these cookies used a nifty technique where you make the dough, roll it into a sausage, then freeze the sausage for an hour. You then cut rounds and bake ‘em. It gives the finished biscuit a nice, almost production-liney regularity. Kinda.

Pecan and white choc is a quality combo, but this basic recipe is probably fairly versatile, so I’ll try some other variations… when HDN delivery my flippin’ Amazon order. Hmph.

I love this recipe, it really deals with a cookie craving and you can adapt it so easily. The original recipe was in the Guardian Weekend (January 20 2007) with some other delicious cakes and tarts by Gill Meller. I like adding rolled oats and raisins but this batch was milk and dark chocolate. I’m about to make some oaty ones with dates (dates in cakes and biscuits are always a winner).

The Recipe:

125g unsalted butter
100g unrefined granulated sugar
75g light muscovado sugar
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla extract
150g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
100g extras – chinks of chocolate, oats, nuts, dried fruit, preserved/crystalised ginger, pinenuts etc….

Oven at 190 degrees, line two baking sheets with baking parchment.
Melt the butter, put the two sugars (I vary the sugars too depending on what I have) in a bowl, pour over the butter and beat well. Break in the egg and add the vanilla, beat to combine. Sift in the flour, bp and salt then stir in your chosen extras.
Dot heaped dessertspoonfuls on the trays leaving plenty of space between. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and leave to harden on the tray for a few minutes before lifting up the baking parchment and transferring to a wire rack.

Then, put the kettle on.