Cookies - Melting moments and cocoa pinwheels

My kids saw me flipping through my bakery recipe book and has requested to have this "cherry in the middle" biscuit to be baked. I have baked this cookie before this blog is born. After some consideration, I decide to bake the cookies with the kids. I have also added another type of cookie into the job list since the instructions look pretty easy to me.

I started off with this cocoa pinwheel biscuit. It is originally a mocha pinwheel but I did not put in coffee essence. I like this recipe because it only involves mixing, and two sets of dough, one for each kid, no fighting. However, I am a slow coach, so for the whole saturday morning, we only managed to do up the dough into a roll and no time to bake it. As this dough is freezer friendly, I simply leave it in the freezer and go to the kids' enrichment class.

We are finally free to bake the biscuit at around 9pm and since its so late, I did all the rest of the work (including the "cherry in the middle" biscuit) all by myself.

The process of making these two types of biscuits is not difficult and I enjoyed it. I must remember to sandwich the dough for the pinwheel biscuit in between two plastic sheets for easy handling. No sticking to roller and easy peel off.

The recipes made 18 cookies each. The "cherry in the middle" biscuit (is called "melting moments" in the cookbook) are all consumed, however, my boy commented that the pinwheel biscuit is too hard, so I have quite alot of these left. My hubby says that the biscuits are nice and I am pretty happy with this round of cookie making.

I hope to try my hands on some CNY cookies .. but meantime, I got to finish hiding all my messy stuff so that the house look presentable for CNY.

Here are the pictures of the cookies.

Recipe time!

Here's the recipe for the mocha pinwheel cookie that I promised SSB. SSB, sorry for the delay.

1 hour preparation, 20 minutes baking, makes 18.

Vanilla layer :

50g/2oz butter or block margarine, softened
25g/1oz caster sugar
75g/3oz plain flour
A few drops of vanilla essence

Mocha layer :
50g/2oz butter or block margarine, softened
25g/1oz caster sugar
75g/3oz plain flour
1 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp coffee essence

Method:
1. Place the ingredients for the two doughs into separate bowls. Bring the ingredients for the vanilla dough together and bind to a soft dough with a tablespoon of water. Wrap and freeze for 15 minutes.

2. Bring the mocha ingredients together and bind to a soft dough. Wrap and freeze for 15 minutes.

3. Roll out each dough to a rectangle 18 x 25cm / 7 x 10 inches. Brush the mocha dough with a little water, then place the vanilla dough on top.

4. Roll both doughs together like a swiss roll form the narrow end. Wrap the dough and chill for 30 minutes or freeze until firm.

5. Preheat the oven to 180 Dc/350F/Gas 4. Grease two baking sheets. Cut the dough into 18 slices each 6cm/1/4 inch wide.

6. Place on the baking sheets and space well apart. Bake for 15-20 minutes until firm and pale golden. Cook on the trays for 2 minutes to firm, then transfer on to a wire rack.


The end. :-)

Baking for the kids

I did the nutella cupcakes again because the kids have nothing to bring to school as snacks. This time I use the mixer, quick and easy, but the swirls of nutella are still not pretty. I find it not easy to swirl because both the cupcake batter and nutella paste are thick. Here are the results.

I went on to try Moist Coconut Cake in Kevin Chai's Easy Stir n Bake Cakes. Very nice, very tasty but really very oily. I also cut down sugar since it has white chocolate. So the next time I try, I will try cut down on oil and sugar. The cakes in this book are really easy, just mix and stir and viola, edible cake. Here's my oily cake. Look at the oily cup, it is actually waxed type but the cup is still soaked with oil.

The moist interior

Last bake of 2008 - Chocolate Cup Cakes

I baked this before, but couldn't find the entry, so I guess I may have did it before the birth of this blog. The post it slips with comments sticking on the recipe page should be sufficient to support my guess.

The comments mentioned that the cupcakes were bitter so this time round I only reduce the sugar by 20g (it was a 50% reduction previously).

I was lazy to do the washing of the mixer so I manually whisk the eggs, butter and sugar so now I still have an aching arm even though the cupcakes are done beginning of last week.

I baked two batches because the first batch is polished up on the same day and my kids still ask for more. However, the 2nd batch took 3 days to finished, perhaps due to the additional choice of cheesecake which I baked the same day as the first batch. I did not do any icing this time, even though I originally wanted my kids to decorate the cupcakes. I only added white chocolate droplets into the first batch and let them sprinkle on some sprinkles on the 2nd batch.

The cupcakes are really tasty (to me) since they are chocolate flavour. Spongey on the inside and a little crispy on the crust.

Here's how mine looked.

The first batch



The 2nd batch


And here's the recipe from the book "Complete Cookery - Baking" by Ann Nicol

Ingredients :-
100g/4oz butter, softened
100g/4oz soft light brown sugar
2 eggs
100g/4oz self rasing flour
25g/1oz cocoa
50g/2oz plain chocolate chips

Icings :-
25g/1oz butter. melted
25g/1oz cocoa
1 tbsp milk
100g/4oz golden icing sugar
50g/2oz milk chocolate mini buttons

Steps :-
1. Preheat the oven to 190dC/375F/Gas 5. Line 18 buns tins with foil or paper cases.
2. Sift the flour and cocoa into a bowl. Add the butter, sugar and eggs. Beat until smooth, then stir in the chocolate chips.
3. Divide the mixture between the lined bun cases. Bake in centre of the oven for about 15 minutes, until the buns spring back when lightly pressed. Remove the buns to a wire rack to cool.
4. To make the icing, beat the butter with the cocoa, milk and icing sugar until smooth.
5. Spread over the tops of the buns and sprinkle each one with a few chocolate buttons. Leave to set for 30 minutes before serving.

p/s : Oh, I found the picture I took of my previous chocolate cupcake attempt. They are done in Aug 2007 with a couple of other bakes like the doggie biscuit and some lemonly stuff. Now I miss my doggie biscuits.