Cooookieeeeeeeeeeeees!

This month I was paired with Edana from YUM FOOD. She has a great recipe for Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Banana Cookies, which I really wanted to make, but we don't have peanut butter chips here in Australia.

Miss Four and I decided to make them regardless, skipping the peanut butter chips, and replacing the chocolate chips with chunks of chopped chocolate from a block. We got 45 cookies from that recipe, but hours later, there is less than 30 left. Whoops.

Ugly, but tasty.

Kids Cooking Thursday: Experimental Lemon & Sultana Choc chip Cookies

Originally from AllRecipes, this recipe was tweaked completely out of shape. The end result was a bit crumbly, hence the cooling upside down on the rack, but although the biscuits themselves were fragile, the flavour was anything but!

Our edits were made from necessity, I didn't have any flour, but I'd already promised Miss Four we'd make biscuits. I used bread mix, which would have been fine, if I'd had the full two cups, and not 1 3/4 cups. The choc chips I threw in, because they were there, likewise with the extra sultanas. Maybe it was that my eggs were on the small side? At any rate, here is the recipe we actually made.

Lemon & Sultana Choc chip Cookies
1 3/4 cup wholemeal bread mix
250g butter, melted
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups white sugar
juice from one lemon
1 cup rolled oats
1 1/2 cup sultanas
1/2 cup choc chips

Squeeze the lemon

Stir together the sugar, egg, butter and lemon juice

Make sure everyone has a turn!

Add in the flour/bread mix. Stir until combined.

Add in the sultanas, oats and choc chips. Mix thoroughly.

Place on paper lined baking trays, lick spoon

When dropping batter from spoon, leave a generous gap between each biscuit

Cook for 15 minutes at 180°C. Cool on wire rack

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Kids Cooking Thursday: Cake Mix Cookies

Inspired by Cupcake Project, (even though I did it myself yonks ago) I thought we'd make cake biscuits. Because I'm lazy, and broke, we used a 65 cent bag of cake mix instead of making cake batter from scratch, and added a cup of tiny chocolate chips. Followed the directions on the pack, only cutting in half the cooking time. I didn't managed to get any photos until the second tray full was in the oven though, so no cute kid-stirring-batter pics this week :(

It's a good method to use when you have cake mixes to get rid of, or the kids want to make biscuits but don't have 'real' ingredients in the house. This makes a thin, chewy biscuit too, so it would be great for ice cream sandwiches.

Batter waiting for the tray in the oven to be free

Cooling rack chock full of goodies!

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Kids Cooking Thursday: 'Eat Me' Cookies

Peanut Butter and Choc Chip Cookies

I saw this recipe over at Apples and Butter and thought it looked so easy, it would be a good recipe to use to start up Kids Cooking Thursday again. I underestimated the stiffness of peanut butter dough, but they had fun eating the chocolate chips at least. Once these came out of the oven, I realised it hadn't said anywhere in the recipe to flatten the balls, and that almost a cup of peanut butter just won't cut it with these cookies. They turned out very crumbly and tasting of over-browned brown sugar, but that hasn't stopped me from eating 3 out of the 12 already. The choc chip bits are sort of chewy though... it's like a salt crust baked choc chip cluster, only instead of a salt crust, it's a sugar crust. Very nice, very rich, and very moreish, but I don't think we'll be making these again, it's really no good for my teeth!

Indigo over at Happy Love Strawberry is turning 18 soon, and asked for themed food for her (Alice in) Wonderland party. I was thinking about making little mushrooms out of meringues, complete with gummy caterpillers, but we don't eat meringue that often, and it's a lot of effort to go to when you aren't going to the actual party ;) But the first thing that popped into my head when I found this recipe was to make "Eat Me" cookies using the chocolate chips. I actually only made one like that, the rest I stabbed in with a tip of a knife, but the writing didn't show up too well once they cooked.

Close up of chips

***View the Round Up for more crazy recipes.***

Kids Cooking Thursday: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Every Thursday is cooking day for the kids in our house. We made the best biscuits today. They are a bit crumbly, and a touch lacking in substance, but there is no eggs in it, so kids (and pregnant women *grinz*) can eat the dough raw. We got the recipe off the back of the chocolate chip packet and it was so incredibly easy, I have to share. I'd link to the webpage at the bottom of the recipe, and point you to the recipe there, but the page is broken. The front page is there, but not a single link or search works. So I'll type it out for you here.

Yummy (egg free) choc chip cookies
Makes 30

225g butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk (I think we ended up with more like 1/3 cup though)
2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder (or of course, you can do what we did, and just use 2 cups S/R flour)
3/4 cup milk choc chips (we used a whole cup)

Preheat the oven to 190°C (Our is fan forced, and our first batch scorched a little, so I turned it down to 180°C for the rest of the biscuits... adjust as needed for your own oven).
Cream butter and sugar in a medium bowl (larger bowl for younger kids... unless you like wearing flour!). Beat in sweetened condensed milk. Cream until the mixture is light and fluffy. Sift flour and baking powder. Stir into butter mixture with choc chips (We did this as two seperate steps, as it was getting heavy for Miss Two to stir).
Roll tablespoonfuls of mixture into balls. Place on a lined oven tray. (Or a slightly greased non-stick tray)
Press biscuits down to flatten. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes or until the biscuits are golden brown.

These do spread a bit, and apparently the 'squooshing' step is almost as fun as 'mixing with a wooden spoon' (a song off one of the Fairies dvds we've borrowed from the library).

It makes a very crumbly biscuit, no soft and chewy cake like things here. Certainly don't give them to the kids to eat if you are paranoid about crumbs and mess. But just out of the oven, and cooled down only enough to be able to pick them up they are soft, if still crumbly, and very, very more-ish. There's a faint hint of caramel, from the milk, but mostly they taste like butter, not suprising since that's the main ingredient. Could have used more choc chips, though we were pushing the limits the mixture could hold... but there's no such thing as too much chocolate. If I were to make again, I'd probably just tip in the whole bag, since I doubt we have more than 1/4 cup left in the packet. We only managed to get 25, so more chocolate might get us to the 30 point lol.

But, as you can see, the kids liked them...

"I can has cookie?" "I gots one!"

DP went and asked Master Three if he could have one, and was refused, until Daddy made it clear he wanted one off the cooling rack in the kitchen, and wasn't intending to steal one off Master Three's plate. Then he was allowed to get himself one.

Very tasty. And, DP has offered to buy pizza for dinner, so I don't have to do anymore cooking today. Feeling very accomplished. :D