Peanut Butter Cookies – Usborne Cakes and Cookies for Beginners

Making chocolate chip cookies yesterday reminded me how much nicer home baked biscuits are than shop bought (and I say this even with my all time favourite shop bought biscuit Kimberley’s sitting in the biscuit tin).

I feel like I’ve been over using Mary Berry’s Baking Bible when I still have a number of neglected cookbooks, especially as this blog started off as a way of making me use more of my many cookbooks. Since I have no chance of working my way through any of my hefty tomes I picked up one of the slim children’s cookbooks Cakes and Cookies for beginners (Usborne Cookbooks) that I’ve used recently and decided to try the peanut butter cookies. I love the way Usborne illustrate every step in the recipe, although again I’m a little surprised that they have nut chopping for a children’s recipe (and they get you to chop twice as many peanuts as you need really, I’ve adjusted the quantities below), also mixing the mixture was hard work, ok for me but children would give up fairly quickly. However rolling the cookie dough into balls was a very child-friendly step.

The quantity below make 24 biscuit sized biscuit. They are nice crumbly biscuits.

Ingredients

• 100g/4 oz butter
• 150g/6oz soft light brown sugar
• 200g/8oz crunchy peanut butter
• 100g/4oz self raising flour
• 100g/4oz rolled oats
• 1 egg (for egg washing cookies before baking)
• 50g/2oz roasted unsalted peanuts for the topping

Instructions

1. Pre-heat oven to 170C/Gas 3
2. Lightly grease two baking trays
3. Put butter, sugar and peanut butter into a mixing bowl and beat until light and creamy.
4. Sift flour into bowl, add oats and mix well
5. Knead mixture in bowl until it forms a soft dough
6. Divide the mixture into 12 piece and roll into balls
7. Put the balls onto the baking sheets leaving space between them, flatten the slightly with your hand
8. Break egg into a small bowl and beat well (I use chopsticks, this book says use a fork). Brush the top of each cookie with some beaten egg
9. Chop roasted peanuts into small pieces and sprinkle them all over the top of the cookie. They will stick to the beaten egg.
10. Bake cookies for 10 – 15 minutes until the are golden. Leave them on the trays for a few minutes to cool then lift them onto a wire rack.

Madeira Cake – Mary Berry’s Baking Bible

I like Nigella’s Madeira cake so much I wanted to try someone else’s version so Mary Berry’s from Mary Berry’s Baking Bible was the obvious choice. This cake includes ground almonds and has quite different quantities of ingredients to Nigella’s. I made it alongside Nigella’s so we could do a family taste test. The conclusion was that both were very good. Jon slightly preferred Mary’s, Conor and I preferred Nigella’s but both were very good. You’d need to be careful to ensure people realised this contains nuts as it isn’t obvious.

Ingredients

• 175g softened butter
• 175g caster sugar
• 225g self-raising flour
• 50g ground almonds
• 3 large eggs
• finely grated rind of 1 lemon
• a thin slice of citron peel (optional)

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C. Grease an 18cm deep round cake tin (or a 2lb loaf tin) and line base with baking parchment.
2. Put butter, sugar, flour, ground almonds, eggs and grated lemon into a large bowl. Beat for 1 minute to mix thoroughly. Turn into prepared tin and level the surface.
3. Bake in pre-heated oven for 60 minutes. If using the slice of citron peel remove cake after 30minutes. place slice of citron peel on top and put back into oven.
4. Leave in tin for 10minutes to cool before turning out onto a wire rack.