Chewy Chocolate Chunk and Oat Cookies

Delhi and Gurgaon have been freezing this year and with friends and relatives being around on and off I have been too lazy and tied up to enter the kitchen. Nothing like snuggling into the blanket anytime the baby decides to nap :)! But one morning I got up and could literally smell the cookies I have been meaning to bake for over a month.

I have been trying to find an easy and healthy recipe for chewy chocolate chip cookies (chewy so my 14 month old son can eat some too...) and have tested a few recipes that I found online courtesy Rachel Ray, All recipes and a couple of other sites and came up with mine which is a little variant from the others but delivers the goods!

This recipe uses the quick cooking Quaker Oats which are heart healthy and give many benefits. I have given up trying to give my husband Oats or porridge for breakfast. Breakfast in our house can range from eggs & sausages to paranthas or dosas - I try to keep it simple and healthy but we do end up indulging on the weekends.

Though this is not the healthiest way to incorporate oats into our diet - I thought we had to make a start somewhere and incorporate the goodness of oats into our lifestyle - http://www.quaker.co.uk/Benefits.aspx

This cookie is a winner with my family and there usually isn't much left when the aroma of oats, cinnamon, chocolate baking waft from the kitchen and I have to hide a box for these to survive over 3 days....

Here goes and do leave comments and updates on how these came out:

1 cup butter softened (about 225grms)
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated white sugar
2 eggs
1tbsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon powder (you can add more for flavour)
3 cups quick cooking quaker oats
1.5 cups all-purpose flour (wanted to use whole wheat but haven't tried it with this variation)
1.5 cups chocolate chunks made from cadbury chocolates (made about 1/4 inch big chunks but you can use any chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, raisins etc)
a couple of spoons of milk

I creamed the butter and sugar in the food processor but it didn't beat too well - so I added about 2 tsps of milk - do add more if required but very little at a time. I then added the eggs. I mixed all the dry ingredients and added the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients (excluding the chocolate chunks).

I then made balls (slightly sticky dough) of the size of a table-tennis ball. I then add the chocolate chunks individually into the cookies and put them on a greased parchment. Flattened them slightly with the end of a wooden spoon and left them a little rounded towards the top . These cookies don't spread too much - so you can make the balls the size of the cookies you want.

I baked them for 13-15 mins at 165 degrees centigrade and then left them on the wire rack to cool. They were yummy and full of taste and I ate the ones that had extra chocolate chunks hidden in them.

I definitely got less than 2 dozen cookies with this recipe but didn't count how many I got....

Pictures too follow soon. And please do leave me some tips on getting the darned pictures right!

Very Easy Thai Green Curry

This is an excellent recipe to put together at the last minute if you have people visiting or you are in the mood for spicy curry n rice combo and don’t want to have regular routine food. I was totally done eating the regular 'dal, roti, subzi' combo and put this dish together in literally 30 minutes including the chopping of vegetables et al. I made this with chicken and whatever veggies I had in the fridge but I am going to give you the recipe for what I usually put in my Thai Green Curry.

Ingredients:

400gm boneless chicken – cut into bite sized pieces

1 medium capsicum – thinly sliced (red, green or yellow)

1 medium onion – thinly sliced

1 small packet mushrooms – thinly sliced

200gm broccoli - florets cut into bite sized pieces

2-3 tbsp green curry paste (I used to make the paste from scratch but gone are those days...)

1 can Chaokoh coconut milk

2 tsp ginger-garlic paste

I added some peas and califlower to to my curry – other veggies that go well with this are babycorn and water chestnut but feel free to experiment.

Recipe:

Take 2tsp oil of your choice and add ginger-garlic paste and saute for a couple of minutes. Add onions and saute till pink. Then add all the other veggies, half the curry paste and a bit of the coconut milk (enough to soak the veggies) and simmer – my family likes the beggies to absorb the taste of the coconut milk. You can cook them less if you want thtem crunchy. Then add the chicken and remaining coconut milk and green curry paste. Add salt to taste and simmer for about 15 mins – make sure chicken is cooked thoroughly. Served with plain white rice or jasmine rice! This is a super easy and super fast recipe and never fails me :). You can always extra green paste to make it spicier and give it an added zing!

Strawberry & Mascarpone on the Sponge...

This was an impromptu dessert to celebrate my son's monthly birthday. We hadn't gotten around to cutting a cake or celebrating his monthly Birthday on the 1st and I wanted to do something special for him over the weekend! We had a late Friday night and was up with my alarm clock (read: my son) at 6:30am.

I wanted a quick dessert completed within an hour before my boys woke up and demanded my attention... Delhi has become really really hot suddenly and I wanted to do something light and fluffy and fruity! I dug out a box of ready cake mix - moist vanilla cake flavor (Pillsbury). I thought I will bake a cake and add some fresh fruit and cream to it and voila my dessert would be ready.

I baked the cake according to the instructions and being a novice baker made added some Mascarpone cheese to the batter and baked it too much and instead of a white fluffy cake I found a flat bread like looking thing in my cake tin.

Anyways here goes the recipe:

Bake cake according to instructions on the box and add one yolk less and 2-3 tbsp Mascarpone cheese to the batter. Bake for 5-7 minutes less than what is mentioned on the box and let cake cool.

I then took equal parts Mascarpone cheese and heavy cream and whipped it together till slightly stiff with 1 tbsp Castor sugar and left it in the fridge (since it was too hot to leave it outside...). While the cake was cooling I ran to my "fruitwalla" and got a box of the most luscious looking strawberries to add to my dessert because I couldn't think of anything better than the bright blood red berries to offset the whiteness of the cake and cream...

If your cake rises nicely unlike mine then slice it from the middle and add 1/4 of the cream mixture and strawberries (cut into small bite sized pieces) and sandwich the two cakes together. Then take the remaining cream mixture and coat the cake on the outside and decorate with strawberries cut into halves.

That was my original idea which didn't pan out quite well... so this is what I did with my dessert:

I tried to slice my cake but that didn't turn out quite well so I cut out small round cakes from my big cake (using a sharp edged bowl). I then pretty much stuck to my original idea and used the marcarpone and cream mixture to sandwich together the cake and strawberries (as seen in the picture and I put the remnants of the cake I put them in glasses - alternating layers of cake, cream and strawberry's and topped it with a dollop of cream.

Despite my disastrous cake the end result turned out to be great. the mascarpone cheese in the cake gave it a a very soft texture dipped in syrup kinda texture and noone can really go wrong with strawberry's and cream!!!!

The dessert won me rave reviews from my in-laws and husband and he actually proclaimed it my best dessert ever! I wish the pictures could do justice to the taste but you will just have to take my word for it.

Till next time....