I have been trying for a long time to perfect the chocolate chip cookie, yeah I know, lofty goals. Anyway I am happy to admit that I may have indeed got there, that’s the thing with creating achievable goals, you can actually celebrate getting there.

There’s something that feels very nurturing and loving  (other things I aspire to) about making your own baked goods. I like to think that my son will eat them, put on some weight and absorb the love that has gone into them. In reality he takes them to school and gives them to his friends.

Anyway I found a recipe that works well for me (and Teenage Pencil’s friends).  It comes from Matt Preston’s book The Simple Secrets To Cooking Everything Better and, like everything in this book that I’ve cooked (a lot), the recipe is easy to follow and magnificent to eat.

His is actually for choc chip cookie dough (which he says his son wanted as a birthday cake) but I baked mine because my son‘s friends  doesn’t like dough.

Here’s what to use:

125grams unsalted butter

3/4cup soft brown sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2cups self raising flour

150grams white chocolate bits
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150grams mile chocolate bits

Here’s what to do:

Combine the butter and sugar and whisk until pale, light and fluffy.

Whisk in the egg and vanilla extract, when evenly combined stir in the flour and chocolate bits with a wooden spoon.

Now this is the most important part I learned from the clever people on my Facebook page – I took the dough and rolled it up in baking paper and refrigerated it for hours. In fact I made two rolls and froze one for use at a later date.

Working with a log of hardened dough it was easy to cut into discs that were nice and thick and, best of all, kept their shape in the oven.  That’s a big part of the trick I was missing before and making biscuits that totally lost their shape in the oven, and were also paper thin. This log method allowed me nice shape and thickness.

The other night I served them to my son with a wodge of ice-cream in the middle. I took the photo (while it was already melting) and then he broke it up into pieces and stirred it around a bit. He may have tasted a bite. Have I mentioned he’s not a big eater?

 

Not sure what that little bit on the side of the top biscuit is – but I am going with taste and very general shape.

The best thing about having a blog with no niche or genre is that I can write about whatever I like – this serves me well because I have the attention span of a small gnat on speed. Jumping from anxiety on the weekend, through cuddling your kids yesterday to a recipe today is no big leap for me. And when you make these cinnamon brioches you’ll be happy I am so flighty.

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Today I entered a level of cooking prep that I hadn’t gone to before. Understanding that I regularly cook for big groups of people (thanks extended family) and I cook daily for a fussy vegetarian (myself) , a carb–avoiding man (my husband) and a growing teenager (my son) , I am well versed with cooking prep.

But today was different. I was cooking for a family who have had some difficult times lately. Someone at Little Pencil’s school has put a roster together for people who want to help to prepare a meal to ensure there is one thing less to worry about for a while.

The roster was a very well organised, online schedule where you could choose the date that suited you best and then insert the meal you would be providing with your name next to that date.

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They (whoever they are) say that you can be whatever you want to be and some days I think I want to be a food blogger . It makes sense because I love food and I have a blog.

I often try my own hand at creating edible stuff and sometimes it works really well and sometimes it fails miserably. It is clear that there is more to food blogging than trying, sometimes succeeding and often failing to cook. So I decided to go a step further – I would eat gorgeous food made by other people and photograph it for my blog.

Only problem is that I am not a crash hot photographer, I know Nothing (with an intentional capital N) about editing images, exposure and lens stuff, added to which I am almost criminally lazy when it comes to doing anything with photos other than loading them on to the computer.

But that didn’t stop me from taking photos of almost everything when we went for the fanciest dinner at Sepia last night.
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It was an incredibly awesome meal marred only by the fact that I felt ridiculously guilty eating such expensive food especially when I saw a homeless man outside the restaurant.

The divide between rich and poor, the haves and have nots is way worse than my food photography could ever be.

People say that social media is responsible for creating an imbalance in the lives we see portrayed on line, that people who use social media are responsible for showing the “feature reel”, only the good, glossy and perfect bits of our lives. I don’t agree with that, I see an awful lot of the gritty bits of life in my feeds, the unhappy people, the strung out parents, the heartbroken, the grief-struck, the lonely, the annoyed, the angry and the frustrated.

But sometimes I actively seek out a bit of the glossy, because who doesn’t want to get away from the gritty every once in a while? And so it was last Friday I was looking through Facebook when I saw this post on the page of the wonderful Katie 180

https://www.facebook.com/KatieOneEighty/posts/929324647124504

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