ginger, choc & walnut cookies

I do not like feeling swamped. But, for me, even worse than the feeling of being swamped is the feeling of being listless. Helpless. Uninspired and unmotivated. I can churn out one brilliant idea after the other when I am swamped, I will hustle towards an end goal and then slam that final ball into that final hoop before collapsing in a puddle of exhaustion and selfcongratulatory thoughts. But when I am listless - oh! I crumple into a ball of miserable ineptitude and discard all thoughts of ever recovering. Usually until I get a sound butt-kicking anyway.

Alternatively, and this has been my recent therapy, I stop. And then I bake. I fold and knead and shape. I chop and taste and watch things grow from little bits of flubbery dough into crisp, warm treats that bring delight to the faces I love. And, if I am feeling particularly listless, I add zing. Like the ginger in these delightful little cookies. You will munch and crunch and feel oh-so-at-home and then your eyes will open and a little ginger-infused grin will appear from the sudden spice. Just lovely.

choc, ginger & walnut cookies
adapted from the AWW's Big Book of Beautiful Biscuits

ingredients:

125g butter
¼C white sugar
¾C brown sugar (lightly packed)
½tsp vanilla
1 egg
1¾C self raising flour
½tsp salt
100g chocolate chips
50g walnuts
50g glace ginger

method:

1. Cube your butter. If you are feeling listless, you may wish to actually cube it. In cubes. Alternatively, you may wish to hack at it with whatever knife you have handy until it is in little pieces. I am more likely to do the former. But, as they say, each to their own.

creamed butter & sugars + egg

2. Toss your perfectly cubed (or not) butter into the bowl of your mixer. Then add the sugars (brown and white - let's not discriminate now). You want to beat them until they are creamy and smooth and not-at-all granulated.

3. Add the vanilla and the egg and beat again until just combined. We want to make sure the egg is incorporated. None of this gross egg-streamy-bitty-thing.

folding in the flour

4. Next up, the dry ingredients. Sift the flour and salt into the mixer bowl and mix through with a wooden spoon or spatula. It will get stiffer near the end, but persevere. You are trying to get-yourself-out-of-this-rut-dammit! Also, with perseverence comes a fantastically toned upper arm. You will have to work the other one out at the gym to balance yourself out.

chopped ginger, walnuts & chocolate

5. We want to do a bit more dicing while the oven is heating up. About 180C should do it. Don't worry if you forget. I'll remind you later. Now, where were we...? Ahh! Chopping! Ginger into bearable chunks. Run a knife through your walnuts a couple of times. We want to know they're there without knowing that they're there if you know what I mean. Discernable but not OTT. You don't need to chop your chocolate if you're using chocolate chips. I used a combination of chocolate chips & lindt bittersweet to make a 100g total. I chopped the latter.

roll, squish, repeat

6. Toss your chopped ingredients haphazardly (or meticulously, as you like) into the mixing bowl and use those (now toned) upper arms and a spatula / wooden spoon to mix them in as evenly as you can. Don't go crazy if they aren't exactly uniformly spread out. That's just how life goes ok? Now breathe.

7. Grab dessert-spoon-sized balls of mix from the bowl and roll them about in your hand briefly before plonking them down on a well oiled tray and giving them a satisfying smoosh with your fingers. Lather, rinse, repeat. (Dessert-spoon-sized balls are halfway between a giant gobstopper & a pingpong ball, just in case you were confused). The cookies will spread just a little, so give them a bit of breathing room. You'll end up with about 40-45 depending on the size of your cookies.

just baked and cooling (if you can wait)

8. Your oven should, by now, have hotted up to 180C. No? Well stick it on now, and don't beat yourself up about forgetting. We'll stick the cookies in for about 10 minutes, a little longer if you like your cookies nice and brown and a little crunchier. 10 mins will give you a chewy, just cooked cookie.

9. In the 10 mins they bake for, you can wash up that one bowl and two beaters and one wooden spoon / spatula you used, or you can sit in front of your oven door and just watch the cookies rise. And oh! How comforted you now are, and not even the slightest bit listless. And ahh, how warm as well. Because that is what ginger does to you. Ditto chocolate.

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my bad day sundae

I know ice-cream is supposed to be hot-weather food, and that the weather is presently the opposite of hot. But yesterday was a Monday. And I got a case of the Mondays something fierce. And when I get a case of the Mondays, there are only two options. Either I lay pathetically on the floor, waiting for someone to scrape me up with a butterknife, or I fix it. In the only way I know how. And that way involves food.

On this particular Monday, fixing it meant high-tailing it down to the shops on the way home from work, grabbing essentials - 1 x Toblerone, 1 x packet of white chocolate & macadamia cookies & 1 x Sara lee French Vanilla ice-cream. Fixing it meant staring morosely out the window of the bus whilst it trudged, bumbled and slid down the roads to where I live. Fixing it meant throwing said essentials together, along with a couple of basics, and making a bad day sundae.

the loot (sans booze, i already had that)

bad day sundae

ingredients for the ice-cream

500ml vanilla ice-cream (as good as can be found at 6pm on a Monday)
2tbsp cognac
2 tbsp milk
75g white chocolate & macadamia cookies

ingredients for the chocolate sauce

100g toblerone
3tbs thickened cream

method

1. Throw your stuff on the floor, shake the rain out of your hair and coat. Trundle towards the kitchen, essentials in hand.

1a. Ok, that first one wasn't really a step. But it will make you feel better.

ice-cream (unadulterated)

2. Grab a bowl. Biggish. Scoop the ice-cream into it with a thud. Jab it a couple of times for good measure.

3. Break the biscuits up in a separate bowl. Go on, snap 'em hard.

4. Douse biscuits liberally in the cognac & milk. Stir a little. You'll have some bits of biscuit still crunchy & some a bit soggy.

boozey bikkies

5. By now, the ice-cream should be a little melty. Think soft-serve. Mix the boozey bikkies in. Stir it good - you want a mostly even distribution.

6. Toss the lot in a container & back into the freezer.

7. Watch the Biggest Loser & feel bad about ice-cream. Groan at people who cry too much. Also those who bitch too much.

8. Eat dinner in front of SYTYCD. Feel a bit better.

9. Break the Toblerone into a small saucepan. Dollop cream in. One, two, three! (So much easier than using a measuring cup).

10. Put saucepan over a low heat and stir, stir, stir (calmly now) until you end up with a rich, gooey, chocolatey nutty nougat-ey sauce.

ice-cream in the glass

11. Rescue the ice-cream. In the glass it goes!

12. Drizzle sauce over liberally.

13. Decorate with crumbled up bikkies (you didn't eat all the spares, did you?)

14. Bad day? No longer. xx

chocolate sauced-up!

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peanut cookies

"Mum..." I ventured, not five minutes after packing the last love letter into its jar "next week, can we make the bang bang?" Mum looked at me. Contemplated, for half a second, and then "No. Too messy." It made sense. The last time we made kuih bankit (fondly known as "the bang bang" at our place), our kitchen was covered in a fine mist of tapioca flour for days. A short pause. "Maybe the peanut ones?" she thought, aloud.

These peanut cookies are a sublime mix of crunchy, sweet and salty. Conveniently bite-sized, you'll find yourself reaching for just one more... and then another, and another, and before you know it, they'll be all gone!

Peanut Cookies

makes approx 120

Ingredients

100g butter
100g margarine
200g peanuts (roasted and ground roughly)
25g sesame seeds (roasted)
200g white sugar
200g plain flour
1 egg (separated)
whole peanuts (optional)

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees (fan on).
21. Toss the butter, margarine, peanuts, sesame seeds, sugar, flour and egg yolk in a mixing bowl.

3. Rub the ingredients together. They will begin to form a dough. Knead the dough until it is shiny.

4. Using a teaspoon, scoop some of the mix up and roll it around in your hands to form a ball. Place the ball on a well greased oven tray and squish down using two fingers.
5. Here, you can either make a small indent in the cookie using the back of a chopstick, or stick a half peanut in the centre of each cookie.

6. Brush the cookies with egg white and pop in the oven to cook for approximately 15 minutes, or until golden brown.
7. Let the cookies cool on the tray. When they hit room temperature, loosen the base with a spatula or egg lift.

8. Enjoy! Mmmmm.... peanutty.....

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love letters

Chinese New Year means different things to different people. For some, the promise of seeing anyone and everyone is enough. For others, its all about the red packets and playing mah-jong. For me, it's (rather unsurprisingly) about the food.

Every year, Dad & I spend a couple of hours sitting at stove making biscuits. "The Stove?" you ask, "Surely you mean the oven?" But no! These flaky, crispy biscuits are made stove top.


Love letters, or "kuih kapek" are a Chinese New Year favourite. They're notoriously hard to make and store, but eating them makes it all seem so worthwhile.

Kuih Kapek

makes approximately 70 biscuits (not including the burnt ones...)

Ingredients:

6 eggs
1 cup rice flour
1 cup white sugar
1 tin (** ml) coconut milk

Method:

1. Mix the ingredients in a bowl.

2.

3. Heat moulds over coals (or in this case, a gas stove).

4. When the moulds are hot, quickly ladle the batter onto one side of the mould and swirl quickly to distribute. Clamp the two halves of the mould back together and return to the gas burner. The batter will bubble over a little bit.

5. When the edges that have bubbled over are cooked, scrape them off and flip the mould. Let the moulds sit over the gas for another 30 seconds.

6. Open the moulds and check if the colour is right.

7. If the colour is good, slide the biscuits out, fold quickly into quarters (here is where asbestos hands come in handy!) and put aside to cool.

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