Mrs. Field’s Chocolate Chip Cookies

Dear Readers,

Vic is leaving for Dubai tomorrow morning, so thought of baking her a batch of her favourite cookies to bring back home. You know, for all the exercise I do, I really must stop baking. Because its always a trial and error kinda thing, and I always sample if my cookie batch is going in the right direction, so at the end of it, I think I ate around 10 cookies. *faints*

Chocolate Chip Cookies a la Mrs. Field's

 

Secret behind Mrs. Field style cookies:
1. Brown Sugar, LOTS OF IT
2. I thought to make the batter more liquidity i’d add more butter, but it turns out MILK is the secret!
3. Baking soda is a must.

 

Alot of websites online give you a rough guideline for Mrs. Field’s cookies, so here is my rough guideline. I absolutely disagree with the recipe that says to add 5 cups of oatmeal. IF YOU TRY THAT RECIPE, you must grind the oats first.  

Mrs. Field’s Chocolate Chip Cookies – for…
I actually don’t know how many batches I can make, but lets just say alot. At least 5 dozen.

• 2 cups of butter
• 2 cups of brown sugar
• 2 cups of white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 5 cups of all purpose flour (The recipe I followed said to use 6 cups of flour! my test batch turned out to be cakey, so I say, start with 5 and work from there, add at your own discretion)
• 1 tsp of baking powder (again, the recipe I followed said to use 2tsps. I disagree entirely)
• 2 pinches of salt
• 1.5 tsp of baking soda
• milk (to gage the texture of the batter)

Directions: Sift the flour with salt, baking powder and baking soda. Cream soften butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract. Combine with flour mixture.

These cookies are suppose to be ‘drop cookies’, so think along the lines of a  gooey sort of texture. <– The kind of cookie batch that needs you to have 2 teaspoons on hand, one to scoop the batter, the other to scrap off the first spoon and  drop the cookie dough on the cookie tray. If your dough is a bit thick and cakey, adding milk should do the trick. These cookies should go in the oven at 200C degrees, for 6-8 minutes, and left to cool for 10 after taking them out.

You want to take them out of the oven when they are 80% done.

They should look flat, OR initially come out fluffy, but after 10 minutes cooling, they flatten down.

Cookie tips:

– baking soda makes the cookies brown faster, and spread more
– white sugar makes the cookies spread more
– butter will give your cookies a more soft texture, if you are looking for hard cookies, go for less butter.

Each big size cookie is a whooping (whop-ing?) 296 calories,
*faints*

Live a little 🙂
Stacy

Blueberry Cheesecake

Welcome Home Dad!

 

Dear Readers,

So on Saturday I baked Dad a welcome home blueberry cheesecake. Initially I was planning to do a new york style cheese cake, but Greg suggested Blueberry (as he remembered it’s Dad’s favourite sort of cheesecake!)

 

Recipe:

The official recipe: (so many recipes on this site!)

http://www.blueberry-recipe.com/basic-blueberry-cheesecake.html 

 

I suggest using a 9inch cake pan, I used a 12 inch it was too big!!

 

Crust : I suggest going FAT all out and go for a short-bread crumb crust. So what you do is take 1/3 stick of butter, and crumble it with all purpose flour until perfect and mix with sugar (to your taste).

Put the crumbs on the cake pan, and pop it in the oven (170) until golden brown. The secret I learnt is to NOT lay on the crumblayer thick, if its super thick then ppl will be really using their forks with force

 

 

Filling:

1.5 packs of cream cheese (leave it out so it can soften)

3/4 cup of plain yoghurt – you know those single packet cups – not 250ml. (instead of sourcream)

Sugar (to taste – roughly 3/4 cups)

Splash of Vanilla

3 eggs

1/2 lemon (for its juice)

1. Beat the eggs and the sugar together

2. Beat the cream cheese until smooth.

3. Combine the 2

4. Splash the vanilla in, around 1.5 teaspoons

5. Add in the yoghurt and lemon juice

 

The mixture should be similiar to melted icecream. Pour the mixture into the cake pan, and bake at 165C for 35-40 minutes

 

When it is done, use a wet knife and cut around the edges, remove the cake wrappan (dont know what to call it)

Let it sit for 30mins, allow it to cool, then put it in the fridge.

Some tips:

 1. Use lemon juice to give the cake zest.

2. I suggest smaller cake pans, my cake pan is huge so when I poured the cheese batter into the pan, it spread, and was relatively thin.

3. When laying out the crust, pad only 1/2 cm down.

4. Best way to cook is Jamie Oliver style  – i.e. using your taste buds.

5. I used yoghurt instead of sour cream

6. Chill in the fridge for 8 hours.

It was quite a success. Yay! So far I’ve conquered – mango cake, carrot cake, blueberry cheesecake, apple pie, apple cobbler, apple crumble, bread and butter pudding, and pumpkin pie.

This weekend my mission is to replicate McVitie’s digestive biscuits. They are SOOO GOOD! and the recipe is top secret! I have a rough idea of how to make it, the key is vegetable oil, baking soda and brown sugar.

Cheesecake is SUPER easy to make. But quite expensive – especially in Asia where cream cheese is expensive and blueberries are extremely hard to find! I made a short-bread crumb crust – extra fatty. The only way to go.

I’m a glutton and hating it,

Stacy