White and dark chocolate cookies

Ingredients

110 g/ 4 oz softened butter (+extra for greasing baking trays)

110 g/ 4oz soft light brown sugar

1 lightly beten egg

250 g/ 9 oz self-raising flour

110 g/ 4 oz white chocolate

55g/ 2 oz dark chocolate

( 1 oz is about 28 g; I think in ounces, so the grams are rounded up or down to the nearest 5 grams and anyway, my scales are not capable of any fine distinction.)

Preheat oven to 190 degrees C (slightly less for a fan oven, c. 180 degrees) /375 degrees F/ Gas Mark 5

Lightly grease 3-4 baking sheets

Put butter and sugar in a bowl and beat until light and fluffy. Add the egg, bit by bit, beating well each time.

Sift the flour into the mixture in instalments and mix well. Add the chopped chocolate (both white and dark) and mix in gently.

Put heaped teaspoonfuls of the mixture on the baking trays, spacing them well apart as they will spread during the cooking, (I put just 6 on a baking tray c 12 x 8 inches).  Bake int the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes, until the cookies begin to turn golden at the edges. Carefully remove the cookies to a wire rack for cooling. (Use a broad spatula as the chocolate makes them a bit unstable until cool)

If you knew people liked nuts, you could exchange the 2oz dark chocolate for 2oz chopped Brazil nuts.

This makes about 24 cookies, each about 2 inches across, which is about the right size to have with coffee after church.

This recipe was based on one for White chocolate cookies in ‘1001 Cupcakes, cookies & other tempting treats’ (Paragon Books, 2009).

It was suggested to me that in order to get more shapely cookies, the trick is to roll the paste into a sausage and to then slice it into medallions. I shall try this next time.

By the time we got to church this morning (this post was drafted on Sunday but not posted until Wednesday), we realised that we had a puncture (the second in a fortnight, to our next door neighbour ‘s three – not that there’s a competition). At the end of the service, stout-hearted men plunged straight out into the pouring rain and, within the time it took the urn to bring the water back to the boil and for it to be poured into the cafetières, the men had changed the offending tyre and were back inside. Our gratitude was as great as our surprise at their speed. Such is the benefit of a parish in a farming community – there’s always someone willing and able to roll up their sleeves and grapple with a large piece of machinery and then come back and look as if they had enjoyed the job.

So bad are the potholes on the country roads that we feared we were going to notch up more burst tyres during our journey of about a mile between the 2 churches. Water had filled the gaping wounds in the roads and gauging their depth and potential for damage was a matter of luck as much as judgement – green verges hid terrible craters at the side of the road while small rock pools seem to have opened up randomly in the middle, all of which made the short drive more like one of Odysseus’s trials as the car lurched between the the scions of Scylla and Charybdis. Now, Wednesday morning, we are pleased to report that half a week has passed with no further damaged tyres. Suggestions for public money to be devoted to road mending get full support from this blog.