Cornflake cookies

Hello, it's M here and today I'm going to be talking about my family's​ new favourite thing to eat. I have borrowed this recipe from FAVOURITE cook book at the moment: Tanya Bakes. This cookies are just too good not to try. They may sound strange but just give it a go.

Ingredients

• 200g Unsalted Butter, soft
• 300g Golden caster sugar
• 1 Egg
• 300g Self Raising Flour
• 80g Cornflakes
• 200g Chocolate or Chocolate Chips

Method

First of all, you need to preheat your oven to 200°c.

Next you need to make sure your butter is warm. Usually I put mine in the microwave for a minute and even though it turns into a liquid its this way it's easier. Whisk your sugar and butter together in a large bowl. Add the egg.

If you are using actual chocolate now would be a good time to chop it. I normally use milk chocolate but you can use whatever chocolate you like. I chop my chocolate into quarters.

Now you need to add your flour, cornflakes and chocolate to the butter and sugar mixture. Use a spoon to bring it together until it creates a sort of dough. 

Next, on 2 baking trays lined with baking paper, roll lumps of dough into circles and put them on the trays. Put 6 on each tray and the recipe should make 12 quite large cookies. Make sure they have plenty of room to spread in the oven.

Cook them in the oven for around 10 minutes. After 1o minutes, if they are not quite done you can put them back in for a few more minutes at a time until they are golden brown, if you like your cookies crunchy, and pale, if you like them softer.

Leave them to cool on a cooling rack and as they cool they will harden up.

I hope you give this really simple and easy recipe a go and hopefully they will be a hit in your house too!

Gingerbread shapes

As its nearly Christmas, I decided to get in the Christmas spirit by baking some tasty gingerbread. These are really quite simple and the only thing you can mess up is how long you bake them for.

Ingredients:

• 350g plain flour
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 175g chopped cold butter
• 175g soft light brown sugar
• 90g honey or golden syrup
• 1 large egg
• extra flour for icing
• icing sugar 
• Any colouring for your icing

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius.
2. Weigh out all your ingredients.
3. In a bowl, put the flour, ginger, bicarbonate of soda and butter.
4. Empty that all into a food processor and whiz it together until it looks like small grains of sand.
5. Take that out of the food processor and back into the bowl.
6. Gently mix together the flour mixture and your sugar (You don't want to work the flour too hard so mixing it separately will help prevent tough biscuits).
7. Empty it all back into the food processor.
8. In a jug, whisk together the egg and honey.
9. Slowly pour the egg mix into the processor while pulsing at the same time. 
10. When the mix starts to clump together, put it onto a floured surface.
11. Gently kneed the dough to make it come together fully.
12. Wrap the dough in tin foil and chill in the fridge for 15 mins. You can cut your dough in half so you don't have so much to work with. 
13. Take your dough out of the fridge and roll it out it a thickness of about 3mm.
14. Using a cookie cutter, cut out your shapes and put them onto a baking tray.
15. Bake your biscuits for around 20 mins.
16. If you want, you could make some icing to decorate and if you are making ginger bread men then you could use colouring to provide colour for eyes and mouth etc.

My tips:

• Make sure to use baking paper or tin foil on your baking tray so the biscuits don't stick
• When cooking, put them in for 15 mins then check them and put them in for longer if they need it

Although this recipe seems quite long, it does make some great gingerbread. I hope you enjoy
making some yummy festive treats! 

Easy Halloween treats

So as its Halloween soon I thought I would make some spooky and yummy treats.

Melting pumpkin and ghost biscuits

So theses are really quick and simple biscuits that look like ghosts or pumpkins. They are super delicious
and a good size so you still have room for all those sweets!

Ingredients

• 1 Pack of digestive biscuits
• 1 Pack of large marshmallows
• Icing suger
• Food colouring
• A glass of water
• Gell icing tubes

Method

1. Make the icing using 4 parts icing to 1/2 part water. Try not to put too much water in because you want it to be quite thick so it dosent run all down the biscuits. For the pumpkins add a little orange food colouring.
2. Get out all your biscuits and marshmallows 
3. Use a little icing to stick the marshmallow to the biscuit
4. Cover the rest of the marshmallow with icing and let it dry
5. When they are dry use some icing tubes to add extra details

My tips

• Make sure the icing is completely dry before adding extra details because otherwise it will all run together.
• Make sure you make your icing quite thick because otherwise it will run all over the biscuit and look more like a dead pumpkin or ghost rather than a slightly melted one. 

Theses biscuits took me 20 minutes to make and I made loads. You could serve them at a party or give them out to little trickle treaters. They are too tasty to not make.

Have fun and happy Halloween. 

Ships Biscuits - Hard Tack

I must admit, it's been a very long time since I wrote a post (April), just a tiny bit embarrassing. Well, I am going to see if I can get back on track.

It is Tudor day this week and we are allowed to bring some Tudor food. I'm bringing in some Ships biscuits, they are called that because you would eat these biscuits on board a ship. They aren't the nicest things in the world, saying that they don't have sugar in them (this is because sugar was VERY expensive in the Tudor period). By the way, you can find this recipe on many sites, mostly the site 'Cookit' comes up.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb flour
• 2 oz butter (In the original recipe it was not used, but it makes the biscuits a little softer and easier to eat)
• 1\2 pint skimmed milk (Water was used in the original recipe, you can use it if you wish)
• 1\2 tablespoon sea salt

My Review
 The recipe is very simple having only 4 ingredients, it doesn't take very long at all. Once the biscuits were cooked me and my mum tried one, my sister didn't want to (I don't blame her). The biscuits weren't that bad, I mean they were quite salty but that didn't make them taste disgusting. I really don't think many people in my class will like them, probably bite into them expecting something sweet to fill their mouth and then just throw the biscuit in the bin. I don't know how many of them I will come back with, probably quite a few. Never mind, all the more for me!
;D
WARNING: ONLY MAKE IF YOU NEED TO OR HAVE AN URGE TO DO SO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gingerbread

On the 1st of February I made some Gingerbread from the BBC Good Food website. It didn't really work but it still tasted fairly nice.

Ingredients:
140g unsalted butter
100g dark muscovado sugar
3 tbsp golden syrup
350g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
pinch of cayenne pepper (optional)

To decorate
50g icing sugar
a few glace cherries (we used undyed)

My tips

• You might want to add another egg because it doesn't stick together very well.

My review
I would never ever do this recipe again, it was a complete disaster. It started off okay, then i had to roll it this is were it all went wrong. I started rolling it and it just cracked...and cracked...and cracked. In the end I just got my mum to do it for me. We ended up having very thick ginger men. I accidentally put a tiny bit of ground cumin in instead of ground cinnamon (oops). Even though the recipe wasn't very good it still tasted really quite nice. I actually had quite a few pieces which is not normal.