A Taste of Home: Afghans

What else is a girl to do when her body is all...

"No. Screw you! You missed those three seconds wherein I was actually tired... and now I'm gonna stay up AAALL NIGHT!!! WoooOOO!!!"

"What?"

"No, I don't particularly care that you have to be up at 6:30am to go count people in a train station. I'M GONNA KEEP YOU AWAKE UNTIL 3AM ANYWAYS!!!"

"VAHAHAHAH!!!"

...but blog? About food. It's the logical solution.

...What's a girl to do when she starts referring to herself in the 2nd person and giving her "Body" a voice and opinion of its own? Probably see a therapist... Well, I am studying psychology (still!) and you know what they say about us Psyc(o) kids...

As for the counting people in at train station? Yes. I'm actually doing that. It's for science. Leave me alone.

Anyway. I thought I said I was gonna blog about food? Yes. Right. Um.

So... I'm in Sweden at the moment - have been for the last almost four months (!)... Haven't really been cooking a lot. Cooking for one sucks. It's horrible! So horrible that I currently cook very rarely. And when I do I make massive amounts of whatever it is and then I have to eat it for days and days because I have THE smallest drawer in the freezer. You know the one. The bottom one which is shorter than all the others anyway... even before it loses half its depth to the freezer motor thingy. Oh! Woe is me! And stuff.

One thing I have gotten really into while over here is proper Kiwi Kai... which is a bit of a misnomer, really... because the only foods (according to Wiki) that are truly unique to New Zealand and New Zealand alone are sweet things... which don't really count as "proper" food... Sorry guys, turns out we didn't invent fush and chups, the BBQ or roast lamb... Who knew?!

But sweets we do well! And they've gone over pretty well too! I've made Lolly Cake (but I ate it all... *ahem* I mean, shared it with all my friends before I remembered to snap a photo), Chups and dup (chips and dip - not exactly a "sweet" but junkie all the same...) and Afghan biscuits! Now referred to by my corridor mates as "those cookies you make" - I've only made them once guys! But I smashed them out of the paaark!

 So - it turns out no one else makes cookies quite like these little babies? I've taken to describing them as "shortbread with cocoa and cornflakes topped with icing and a walnut" ... which works well until the person you're talking to asks in their cute, European accent "what is shortbread?"

*sigh*

Describing things. Not one of my greater talents. I usually say - "Look, next time I make 'em - I'll give you a call, yeah?" ... but I haven't made them since. Mostly because I used up the last of my flour and cocoa to make the photographed batch here... and as I'm basically moving out in a month (!) I can't really justify the Swedish prices to buy more...

Don't get me wrong though, these are totally student appropriate! There're only, like, 5 ish ingredients most of which you probably have naturally occurring in your pantries!

I'm talking about a shit-tonne of butter (technical term), some flour, a bit o' cocoa, a very small quantity of sugar and 1 1/2 cups of cornflakes... and that's it. Then there's the icing and essential walnut... but the cookie part is basically a pantry given!

The recipe I followed is fairly simple... there are some negative reviews on the basis of the biscuits being to "crumbly"... Guys. This is shortbread. It is crumbly. That's the point. Squish it! Or - start with only one cup of cornflakes they'll be what gets in the way of the sticking power of the butter.

Oh, and there's not a whole lotta sugar in the cookie for a reason - the icing is a little bit non-negotiable. Buttercream or icing/glaze is up to you! Just as long as it's there! The walnut? Up to you. For me, they make the cookie. The recipe I was using suggested flaked almonds (WTF?!)... some people go without entirely! O_o

Intrigued? I hope so! Read on, Mac Duff!

Honey Biscuits

Hi There! My name is Kat and I am the author of this blog! Apparently...

... if this blog had an author ... who actually wrote it ... regularly ... ?

As my dearest, darling pen pal Rosie will confirm, and as I have probably explained before... regular writing is not really my forte... I write to her about once a year. Mostly. Except for last year. When I wrote, like, three letters and posted approximately none of them. Pen pal of the year right here!

The point of this little rant is that I'm still here! Still cooking! Still blog stalking all my favourites... :) And now I will do some rabid posting for a little bit... if not here then maybe here or there...? We'll see...

For now, I'm going to start clearing some of my ever-growing back log of images of food that I've made!

Starting with these:

Honey biscuits! Which I made for a friends Nana who'd just had surgery and lives near-by...

This recipe comes from a book called, interestingly enough, Honey Biscuits , that I read in primary school about a boy who bakes with his Grandmother who explains where all the ingredients come from... it was my favourite book! The recipe which was explained throughout the story is printed in full...

This is the version I wrote out, from memory, so that I could bake them with my Grandma (I was probably 6-7)

And this is the translation of my pictograms (spelling wasn't my thing)

Down the far side of the page is 12-13 year old me writing the translations in... I've cropped that bit because it wasn't so cute!

These biscuits are small nuggets of spicy honey flavour and simple/cheap enough for students of any age to make!

Peanut Chocolate Cookies

I looove peanuts! In fact, I looove just about every nut I can think of... :) But peanuts are pretty awesome. Especially because they're affordable even when you're broke. Unlike almonds and macadamias... Snobs.

I wanted to make a really peanut-y peanut and chocolate chip cookie! But I didn't have a recipe that was going to offer what I wanted it to - so I developed my own!

I thought about substituting all the butter from an original recipe for peanut butter - but Google suggested that that wouldn't work... So I subbed half. I also halved the quantity of sugar (surprise!) and made the chocolate chip measurement half chocolate chunks/half salted, roasted peanuts, added in some refrigeration time... and then I made the cookies HUGE!!!

I don't know why I do this. I like crunchy cookies. And I like gooey cookies. But I do not like cakey cookies. I know this. And I also know that taking a "should be" crunchy cookie and making it HUGE will result in a cakey cookie... and therefore I won't looove it... but I find the allure of a ginormous cookie too strong! And have yet to learn to listen to my inner voice which says "Kat. No."... but that voice does seem to know only those two words... so I've learned (learnt?) to drown it out!

In an effort to combat the huge cookies = cakey cookies equation I did refrigerate the dough for about an hour before baking them. Apparently something to do with the butter melting from scratch inside the cookies helps ensure fudginess? Or something... I can't quite remember the mechanics of it all! I think if I hadn't subbed half the butter for peanut butter this may have worked... but as peanut butter isn't famous for its melting properties... gooeyness was not achieved.

The flavour was great, though - so I'd recommend that future cookies are made normal sized and enjoyed two at a time. With milk. All cookies should be enjoyed with milk. :)

P.S. My favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe makes HUGE and gooey cookies... but the amount of butter required is astronomical... and convincing my Mother that making them is a good idea is not an easy task... but watch this space!

Caramel Sandwich Cookies

These have been heralded by my flatmates as "the best melting moment cookies ever!!!"

...I should have published these for Valentine's Day...

They vary slightly from traditional recipes because I've added a little milk to the dough so that it would be rollable so that I could make cookie cutter heart shapes.

But I still wanted that melting-moment feel - which is why I didn't use a standard sugar cookie dough...

The icing is runnier that I intended - because I wanted it to be frosting for my Choco-Caramel Cupcakes (I didn't post a recipe - but there's a picture of them...) but because this icing involves heat it's runnier and not fluffy like frosting... quite how I expected frosting I'm not sure... my brain was tired? But the icing is tasty! And it really made these cookies.

A note on frosting vs icing... if it's liquidy/doesn't hold its shape when piped, I call it icing - if it's pipeable and holds its shape, I call it frosting... and if it's totally liquid and runs everywhere with a mind of its own, I call it a "drizzle"... :)

Cookies on a Chess Board... Just 'Cause...

Read on for instructions on how to make your own crunchy, sweet cookies...

Taste & Create: Chocolate Explosion Oatmeal Cookies

This month for Taste & Create I was paired with Alisa Fleming of Alisa Cooks... Alisa's blog is dairy free, not a realm in which I oft' walk so reading her blog was an interesting experience for me... further more many of her recipes are gluten-, soy-, egg- and/or nut-free... I had a great time perusing her recipes!

Eventually though, I found her recipe for Chocolate Explosion Oatmeal Cookies made with rolled oats, they are vegan, egg-, nut-, dairy- and soy free - therefore they MUST be a health food... and BOY! are they the tastiest health food EVER! :)

Beautiful, glossy, dark brown cookies...

Deliciously gooey in the centre - yes that's a broken-in half cookie... they're light enough to sit a-top a rose petal!

I was so proud of me - I was going to tell y'all about how I finally, finally followed a recipe to the letter! And then I thought about it... and how I:

•  halved the recipe...
• and then I didn't have any ground flaxseed (linseed), so I tried to replace it with wheat germ (apparently you can do that...?) but I didn't have any of that either so I used oat bran instead (I made that alternative up myself)... (ironically, if I'd been at the flat making these I would have been able to use flaxseed as directed...)
• and then I doubled the vanilla called for because we only had essence, not extract...
• and I added just the tiniest pinch of cinnamon a la Laura Vitale...
• and used all coconut cream, rather than coconut flavoured dairy-free milk and olive oil...

So, in the end, I baked like the Kat I am - to my own tune! But the cookies truly are delicious!

I do have one question though - I halved the recipe, but I made the large, 2 Tbsp sized cookies Alisa recommended... a whole 14 of them (after I ate, maybe a cookie's worth of batter... hey! it's egg free, it's all good!)... which begs the question: Have I finally found someone who enjoys eating cookie batter even more than I do? :)

Taste & Create: Ginger Cake Cookies

Hmmm... I'm just a tad late with this month's Taste & Create... But, better late than never, right?

This month I was paired with Debbi of Debbi Does Dinner... Many of her recipes are aimed at being low-calorie - with a few naughty treats thrown in! :)

After much thought, I settled on Debbi's recipe for Ginger Cookies... and, after a little tinkering of my own - this is what I came out with:

Ginger Cake Cookies

Now, I named these ginger cake cookies because I substituted Debbi's 3/4 cup of vegetable oil for 150g of melted butter - this resulted in a cake-ish textured cookie - if you'd prefer more of a ginger snap go ahead and use the original oil.

The porous hardness of these cookies makes
them great for dunking!

Further alterations I made were to halve the amount of sugar called for - and to use brown, rather than white sugar. It'd be interesting, I think to experiment with relying only on the treacle/molasses for sweetness in these cookies... Another change was to substitute Debbi's molasses for treacle - because I didn't have any... To make these more student store-cupboard friendly, you could probably further substitute the treacle for the more common golden syrup...? Maybe. My final alteration was to the spicage used... Debbi recommends 1 tsp of ground ginger and 1 tsp of ground cinnamon within the cookie... I put 2 tsps of ground ginger into the cookie and used the cinnamon to spice the sugar the cookies were sprinkled with/rolled in before baking. But spice is such a personal thing - I encourage you to do with it what best suits your tastes! Oh! And I also chucked in a cup of wholemeal flour and one white instead of two white...

Overall - these were tasty little morsels they remind me somewhat of my favourite "Honey Biscuits" which I must post some time... Even if I don't make them again (my love of ginger has yet to completely mature...) I'm sure my Mummy, who was quite taken with them, will...

Below is my tinkered with recipe - for the original see Debbi's site!

PANIC! And true - cupboard scraping Student Food...

Hello Everybody!

Hello Shelby Mae!

Shelby Mae is my Taste & Create buddy for this month... She has a real awesome blog which she's written so that her children and future grand-children can have memories of her. Which, is basically the BEST reason to blog EVER!

And I was flicking through her blog... She have this really useful thing down the side where you can pick out key words... Thus Kat was drawn to cupcakes... And about halfway down this page, Shelby Mae talks about how she is doing her best to be vegan "Good on her!" I thought "I could never do that!" and then... "Wait! Do I have any vegan recipes on my blog?!" *looks at blog* "Hmmm... No, not reeeally..." and then "I don't even have any particularly healthy recipes on my blog. Wow!" *looks through photos on hard-drive* "No... no... no... Oh dear..."

So instead I decided to post these peanut butter cookies. Which are yummy, but contain eggs...

Peanut butter cookies. And no, Mummy, that photo was totally NOT taken on my bed... I would never eat in bed and I definitely make my bed every day... *grins a totally beLIEvable grin*

Now, before I post these... I want to alert y'all to the vegan/able and sort of healthy-ish recipes currently residing on study food:

Vegan:

Home Made Potato Fries
Muesli (provided you don't use honey...)
Fruit Salad Dressing

Annnd. Um. That's it.

Vegan-able:

Potato and Leek Soup - just leave out the cream/milk/cheese and use vegetable instead of chicken stock!

At the very least healthy! ish...

Cottage Cheese Loaf
Cottage Cheese Cupcakes
Pancakes
Spanokopita
Lemony, Fishy Rice
aaand:
Breakfast Muffins

That's it. The rest is not very good for you but very, very yummy - I promise! :)

Thanks to Shelby Mae for opening my eyes to the demographic (is that the right word?) my blog is completely missing! I'm really enjoying reading your blog! I look forward to seeing what you pick from mine...

And without further ado... the recipe for Peanut Butter Cookies

Chocolate Oat Spice Cookies

Finally!!! Something I've baked and posted in not just the same year, or just in the same month,  and not only in the same week but one the very same day!!! Yay me!

Aaand it's sweet... Aaand it's chocolately!! And it's so totally amazing that I'm all but going to refer to this little creation of mine as the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Everrr... But I'm not going to say that. 'Cause you have crisp cookie people and cakey cookies people and bite-sized cookie people and GINORMOUS cookie people and it's simply impossible to please them all! I fall into the "Dude, if it's got chocolate - it's gonna be AWESOME" catergory... We're easy to please.

This cookie is sort of an adaption from a family friend's recipe... But by the time I've halved the sugar, reduced the butter, increased the vanilla, removed the salt (I use salted butter...), changed the type of flour called for (and the oats), and added cocoa and a substansial amount of nutmeg... I think I can just about call it my own... Don't you?

I secretly feel that these cookies are almost healthy what with the dark chocolate, rolled oats, wholemeal flour and  reduced sugar/butter content... But that might just be wishful thinking!

Here the are:

The Best-Ever Chocolate Chip Cookies, According to Kat

Don't they just look gorgeous?

Recipie follows the jump...