Raspberry and White Chocolate Biscuits

One of the benefits of cleaning your house out is that you need to use up what’s left in the fridge/freezer/cupboards, or, at least, the perishables. So, following my batch of Raspberry Spiked Chocolate Brownies, I had some raspberries left over. I also discovered that I had a whole bag of really manky, heat-effected white chocolate chips. Unfortunately, as I discovered, manky white chocolate doesn’t recover its tastiness quite as well as manky dark or milk chocolate when baked so it came out kind of chalky. It still tasted okay, but I recommend using new choc chips!

I used a basic recipe for Whatever Biscuits that I remember by calling it “half, half, one, one, one”. Which is actually totally inaccurate, it’s just a way of remembering it, same as I remember how to make pavlova (4-1-1-1, which, conversely, actually IS completely accurate). I turned one of the “one”s into “slightly bigger than a half, x2” and added some vanilla, which I guess could be another “one” because it was probably about one teaspoon, but may also be a “half” because I guess I didn’t put that much into it, so maybe it was half a teaspoon? Of course, the first half isn’t actually a half, either – it’s slightly less than a half. And if you’re American, I’m pretty sure you’d call it “One, half, one, one, one” because that first half is a little less than half an Australian block of butter, which I **think** equates to about one American “stick”. But I’m not American. I’m also rambling. I think what I’m trying to say is that it’s a fairly flexible recipe, and that if you’re Rain Man enough you can find a pattern in anything!

INGREDIENTS:

110g butter, cubed. Helps if it’s soft. (half #1 = half an Australian block of butter)

½c sugar (half #2)

1 egg (one #1)

Vanilla to taste (new, mystery entity that could be either a half or a one, depending on your taste)

1c SR flour (one #2)

½c + a bit of white chocolate chips (combined with the raspberries is one #3)

½c + a bit of frozen raspberries (I think having them frozen helps so that they disintegrate into little balls not mush)

METHOD:

1. Preheat oven to 180oC (the magic number for most baked goods! That said, I would probably consider turning it down a bit next time because of the sugar in the raspberries)

2. Line 2 trays with baking paper

3. Beat butter and sugar until smooth/creamy/pale

4. Add egg and beat until combined

5. Add vanilla to taste

6. Add flour; mix well

7. Add choc chips; mix well

8. Add raspberries; mix well but try not to completely crush them into oblivion. You want some pieces in there, not just a pink biscuit dough

9. Roll into tablespoon-sized balls and bake for 12 minutes or so. Keep an eye on them because the raspberry component seems to like to catch

10. Cool for a minute or two and then transfer onto a cooling rack

11. Test-eat all the ugly ones whilst watching Gilmore Girls in your pyjamas

13. If you’re not happy with them, give them another run in the oven

14. Test-eat one more, just to be sure

12. Share them with friends

Now, I found these to be a little on the soft side – not at all a crunchy biscuit – so it you’re feeling especially coordinated you could maybe add a little more flour to compensate for the juiciness of the berries (and the ice crystals stuck to them – so maybe the trick is NOT to use old frozen raspberries!). I am aware it’s common to dust berries with flour prior to adding them to cake batters to stop them sinking so much, so maybe that’s the sort of quantity of flour we’re talking about here.

In the end, the following morning (before I brought them to someone’s house for morning tea – I am incapable of not fiddling with food if I don’t think it’s quite right and someone else will eat it), I whacked them in the oven for about another 6-8 minutes at about 180oC (and at some point I turned it up higher, because we know what an impatient and imprecise cook I am). I watched them VERY closely this time to make sure they didn’t catch. They seemed to brown on top more than the bottom this time around. I guess some of the moisture had evaporated from them overnight or something.

Anyway, here they are!

Do you like the plate, by the way?

I had a sudden stroke of genius the other day when I saw this on sale. I realised how hard it is to take photos of biscuits on glossy white plates, and also kind of boring, so I found a few of different colours and patterns in various bargain bins. This one set me back – wait for it – a dollar. And from a really expensive store that sells only Waterford and Villeroy & Boch and Royal Albert the like, too. Bargain! Don’t ask me what brand it is, though. Don’t get me wrong, white plates look great with some foods. Anything involving Bok Choy looks spectacular on a white plate – I think it’s the crisp white and the crisp green that does it. Biscuits? Not so much. Not to me, anyhow.

If the white background has you puzzled, it’s a piece of tissue paper (from the purchase of this plate) draped over my clotheshorse near the only window that gets good natural light. There were some better photos of the biscuits, but that was before I added the tissue paper, so the plate is basically sitting on top of towels, underwear and socks that were drying, and I didn’t think you really needed to see that when you’re supposed to be focussing on the biscuits!

Also, about a week earlier I made a variation of these but with dark chocolate and pecans, both chopped. I ate them before I remembered I was supposed to take a photo of them. And some of them were GIGANTIC biscuits (but not quite as gigantic as the ones me and my BFF Alice used to make as teenagers. Or as phallic. Giggle. Yep, we used to make phallic choc-chip biscuits, and also giant ones, and then we’d eat them with giant glasses of milk. It was one of the many things that cemented our friendship J Hi, Alice! *waves* Um, sorry if you didn’t want the entire universe to know about that!).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, those dark choc and pecan ones were soooo gigantic and soooo tasty... *has a sudden epiphany as to why I gained weight last week* Oh, and I didn’t mention in the above recipe that I was using unsalted butter because it’s all I had left, and added salt to compensate, so I don’t know whether you may want to add some salt to your mix. Up to you. Do what feels right. Same went for the dark chocolate/pecan combination, which I suspect could probably benefit from a pinch of salt.

Damnit, now I want biscuits!

Donna Hay's Raspberry-Spiked Chocolate Brownies

Oh boy, oh boy, oh BOY, these are scrum-diddily-umptious! Diddily.

Assuming you like rasperries.

If you don't, you'll probably hate them.

But that's not really my problem. More brownies for me!

I made Donna's Raspberry-Spiked Chocolate Brownies for my friend Jody's kitchen tea, along with those Short-Black Cupcakes I posted out a few posts back (I'm having connection dramas so I won't give you the link but you can probably find it yourself if you click on Recipe on the word cloud in the side bar). I've made them before with the same results but I never bloody learn. See notes below.

Oh, FYI, I refer to her simply as "Donna", cos we're, like, totz BFFs. Totz.

Again, the recipe is out of Chocolate from her Simple Essentials range, available for purchase here (see disclaimer below).

200g dark chocolate, chopped

250g butter <-- always onto a winner when your baked good contains a whole block of butter :)

1 3/4c brown sugar

4 eggs

1 1/3c plain flour

1/4tsp baking powder

1/3c cocoa powder, sifted

1 1/2c raspberries, fresh or frozen

Preheat oven to 180oC. Melt chocolate and butter over low heat and stir until smooth (note that this is where I diverged from the instructions to save some washing up, but I don't think it made a great deal of difference). Remove from the heat and add the sugar and stir. Then add the eggs and stir quickly as you add each one (I made the assumption that the saucepan may cause the chocolate mixture to retain heat and therefore cook the eggs on impact, so I wanted to make sure I didn't have big fat chunks of cooked egg in my mixture!). Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa and mix.

Pour into a 23cm, greased and lined square cake tin (line it a fair way up the sides so you can pull the brownie out using the baking paper once it's done and plop it on the cooling rack). Top with raspberries and bake for 45 minutes or until set. Brownies should be very fudgy in the middle.

Note that this final instruction is somewhat misleading. It never **really** sets, and my definition of "fudgy" is more like "moist mud cake; lot of crumbs and a little batter may stick to the skewer when you test it", whereas in this instance I think it means "thick cake batter".

Foolishly, I made the mistake of leaving it in the oven to cool while I ran off to the movies, and as a result the edges dried out and charred a little. This meant that I had to cut the outsides off and lost at least 1/4 of each brownie, if not more.

The instructions stop after the notes on the texture, but I think that you would ideally let it cool in the tin for 5-10 minutes to keep some moisture in the outer edges, and then lift it onto a cooling rack. I also found that refrigerating them overnight kind of made them set a bit better.

They're very sweet and rich and fudgy, but the raspberries really set that off. I love foods that feature two competing flavours like this. Definitely a winner!

Note that if there is no photo of the brownies then this means that I have been unable to transfer the photo from my phone to my laptop before the scheduled post date. Or that I have in fact gotten my laptop back from the Laptop Doctor but I've been too lazy forgotten to upload the photo. If there is a photo, please don't judge it. It's a bad photo. But a very tasty brownie. C'mon people, you all know what brownies look like!

Disclaimer: Donna Hay (or Donna, as I like to call her) has no idea that I exist. I like to link to her personal website's shopping section to prevent her from suing my butt off for publishing her recipes without her permission. I'm not sure how Copyright works but I like to think this helps, somehow...

The Daring Kitchen: Cooking with Tea

Well. This post is going to be totally crap because I not only did a really half-arsed job of the recipe (i.e. I read it two weeks prior to cooking it and then sort of... guessed what was in it!) but I also cooked it in one helluva rush (after the brownies - yet to post on that - but before the cupcakes) on my way out the door to the movies to see The Cup (great movie, btw), but then the only photo I was able to take of it was with my phone, under terrible lighting conditions (fluorescent lights plus the light of an LED headtorch because I realised that there wasn't enough light for my phone to cope!). I was hungry and determined not to miss another Daring Kitchen challenge so I sort of threw it all together. And then I ate it. And then I powerwalked to the movies (cos I'm not allowed to run alone, but frankly, a seriously determined powerwalk coupled with the stress of running in late was probably worse for the ol' ticker than actually jogging would have been. I think my boobs prefer me to powerwalk, though... just sayin'!), and then I had to sit in the cinema, dripping with sweat with a stitch from eating my soup too fast and then powerwalking. Luckily I remembered to bring a jumper, otherwise I would have frozen to death as my sweat evaporated.

I know, you all loved that visual. You're welcome :)

Also, three cheers for sentence structure!

Aaaaaaaaanyway, Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry

So... I guess, first up I'll tell you what I did, and then I'll tell you what I was supposed to do!

WHAT I USED:

2 green teabags

A kettle full of boiling water (filtered - I cooked it in Adelaide and didn't think the natural tap water would do much to improve the taste of the soup!)

A 2cm chunk of ginger from my freezer that had been thawed, and was oozing liquid all over the place and not very aesthetically pleasing and kind of rubbery in texture, but the flavour of which was okay *draws breath*, kind of peeled (= the skin hacked off) and chopped into tiny little pieces

Beef, finely sliced (I wanted to use a decent steak but couldn't find it in a small enough quantity, so ended up finely slicing gravy beef, which is why it turned out tough, but I'm totally okay with that!)

Bunch of bok choy, bottom cut off, sliced in half, rinsed

Small packet of rice vermicelli

Chinese five spice

So I boiled the kettle, soaked the tea in the hot water in a saucepan until I had a saucepan of green tea, removed the teabags, put the saucepan on the heat, added the ginger and brought it to the boil, then threw in the beef and the bok choy and topped up the water so the bok choy was mostly covered.

I boiled it until the bok choy was done but still a bit crispy, cos that's how I like it. Then I put half the packet of rice vermicelli in a large-ish serving (soup) bowl and added about half the soup. Rice vermicelli, you see, basically cooks on its own in a minute or two when you pour boiling liquid over it. I kept the other half for the following night's dinner, which I then captured in a crappy photo on my phone, which isn't part of this post because my normal laptop is at the doctor's (it gave me the Blue Screen of Death the other day) and I can't make my phone synchronise with either my old laptop or my mum's. Boo. Don't worry, you're not missing out - it's a super-duper-crappy photo.

In hindsight, it needed soy sauce. Or possibly a wee pinch of stock powder And maybe a little chilli. But I must say that I'm a little bit curious and quite impressed at how quick and easy this was, and also quite liked the unaccustomed flavour of the green tea - I will definitely be trying to make variations of this in the future. Thanks for the inspiration, Sarah!

So, anyway...

WHAT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO COOK:

Servings: 4

Ingredients
4 green tea teabags, or 1½ tablespoons (22½ ml) (3 gm) green tea leaves
1¼ inches (3 cm) fresh ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
5 oz (140 gm) thick or thin egg noodles
10 oz (280 gm) firm tofu, drained and cubed
5 oz (140 gm) bok choy or spring greens, shredded
1-2 tablespoons (15-30 ml) light soy sauce
2 tablespoons (30 ml) (1 oz) (30 gm) red or white miso paste
½ teaspoon (2½ ml) sesame oil
6 scallions (also called spring onion or green onion), trimmed and sliced
a handful of shiso (Japanese basil or perilla) or mustard cress, or other micro greens, to garnish

Directions:

1. Place 6 cup (1½ litre) water in a pan with the green tea bags or leaves and the ginger slices. Heat until the water is just below boiling and bubbles start to form.

2. Remove the pan from the heat and let it steep for four minutes.
3. Remove the tea bags or strain the liquid to remove the tea leaves. Return the ginger slices to the liquid and reserve.
4. Meanwhile, cook the noodles according to package instructions in a separate pan.

5. Return the tea liquid to the heat and add the tofu, bok choy

6. Scoop out some liquid to a small bowl and mix in the miso paste. Then return the liquid to the pan.

7. Add the sesame oil and scallions. Spoon into bowls and garnish with the shiso, cress, or greens.

Having just read over this recipe, it is far superior to the one I whipped up and and I can imagine how awesome it would taste. Although, to make it boy-friendly you would probably replace the tofu with either thinly-sliced steak or maybe dumplings of some sort. And  you may consider frying the steak first and dumping it in at the last possible minute. Just a thought! I recommend trying the recipe that I was supposed to cook and not the one I actually did. Watch this space for a new and improved version...

Green Tea, Tofu, and Noodle Soup