Cookie Monster

So, I am coming to the end of a long summer after finishing my final year of school.

You would think I would be out all day and all night partying with all my really cool  friends. But thanks in part to the beautiful English weather but mainly to my laziness, this summer has resulted in many days lying in my bed re-watching endless episodes of 'Grey's Anatomy' and 'Keeping up with the Kardashians'. 

It's been pretty wild. 

From my little bedroom I have been exploring the world of baking via the magical Internet. Spending all day staring at beautiful pictures of food makes me very hungry, so hungry in fact that I have overcome my immense laziness and found my way into the kitchen.

I am in no way professional and I'm not entirely sure why I enjoy baking but I do. A lot. 

Onto my first recipe, these are with out a doubt the best cookies you will ever make and I stumbled upon this combination entirely by accident. 

These technically should not be sliced, well I supposed they could be but it would be a bit weird.

225g unsalted butter, at room temperature

300g light soft brown sugar

75g dark brown sugar

50g caster sugar

3 teaspoons of vanilla extract

2 eggs

400g plain flour

2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

2 handfuls of Chocolate chips

1 large bag of Peanut M&Ms

Whatever else you want to add

1. Preheat the oven to 150-170 degrees Celsius. Start by cutting up the butter into rectangles and leave it out of the fringe for a while to soften, like so:

The butter should be soft enough so when you poke it it leaves a finger print.
Also poking butter is surprisingly fun.

 2. Pour all the sugars into a bowl and then add the soft butter. Cream them together on a medium speed. At first it will look a bit like wet sand but keep mixing and eventually the mixture will be creamy and will lighten in colour. Don't forget to keep scrapping down the sides of the bowl to keep the colour and consistency even. Then throw the vanilla into the mix.

All 3 sugars mixed together

Wet sand

Creamy and smooth

3. Add both eggs slowly while mixing on a high speed. Don't worry if the mixture congeals, flour will fix all your woes.
4. Now add the flour and the bicarb to the mixture. I usually add it one tablespoon at a time to prevent having a flour shower although I'm sure it make no difference to the texture of the cookies.

In case you have forgotten what 400g of flour looks like 

Starting to look more like cookie dough

Now, this is where the fun began. I only had a small amount of chocolate chips so I sent my hopeless brother out to buy more, but when he returned he presented me with a big bag of peanut M&M's. Great.
At first I questioned how my brother could be so stupid as to misunderstand simple instructions and contemplated eating all the cookie dough and forgetting the whole ordeal even happened. But no, a real Bakeress would soldier on..... 


5. Leaving the bag of m&m sealed, take a rolling pin, or any hard object, and go to town on those bad boys. Hit them, crush them, pulverize them. Show'em whose boss. When they have been sufficiently beaten add the carnage to your cookie dough mixture.

The scene of a peanut M&M mass murder

6. Mix them up real good with whatever else you want, raisins, nuts, oats, white chocolate chips, dark chocolate chips, milk chocolate chips, magic dust...
I just stuck with peanut M&Ms and a few chocolate chips because I had nothing else in the house.

It is at this stage were you must fight every instinct to
 forget about the oven and eat the delicious dough straight from the bowl 

7. Spoon the dough into reasonably evenly sized blobs on a sheet of grease-proof paper.
 Don't worry about flattening them, they will flatten as they bake.

Balls of joy

8. Bake for 8-12 minutes depending on your oven, I usually leave them for about 9 minutes, I like very squishy cookies. They should be slightly puffed and a little golden on the edge.

Just remember with cookies, slightly under-cooked taste MUCH better than slightly over-cooked. The longer you leave them the crispier they will be.

COOKIES

9. When they come out the oven DO NOT MOVE THEM. Especially if they are under-cooked, they will be very squidgy and turn to mush extremely easily. 
Let them solidify for about 15 minutes before transferring them onto a cooling rack and leaving them to cool for a further 20 minutes.
They should last about 2 days in an airtight container, but in my house they rarely last more than a few hours.

Enjoy!