Busy Baking

So, the first non-bank-holiday day of my week off and I’ve been editing this month’s KnitCast and doing some baking.

Cookies on baking paper

For years I yearned of making large, moist, chewy  chocolate chip cookies.They’re easy to find in stores etc. but I wanted to make them at home. A friend of mine went to work in the United States in the early nineties and sent me home a cookie recipe book but of course it was all in American measurements and ingredients. So I was left with questions  like – how much does a stick of butter weigh? I’m still not entirely sure what shortening is, but whatever it is,  you can’t get it here.  I remember having mixed results whenever I tried to bake cookies and then moved onto cakes and muffins which were far more successful.

Last year I decided to bake cookies again and when I googled Chocolate Chip Cookies this recipe came up first in the list. It’s by Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall and, my dodgey oven aside, it’s foolproof. I’ve had great success with this recipe and it has relatively few ingredients. Nowadays I just use salted butter and thus you don’t need the pinch of salt. Hugh has you use the best chocolate you find and to roughly chop it but I do use chocolate chips and other ingredients. I usually slightly increase the vanilla essence either by accident, slopping too much in the bowl,  or design. I also use my electric mixer to make the cookie dough so it’s even simpler.

Cookie closeup

For today’s batch I used chocolate chips and chopped up some crystallised ginger that I had too. I didn’t weigh the ginger but you can put anything in these cookies. I imagine they’d be good with sultanas or cherries and coconut too.

Two of the cookies mysteriously vanished...

I tried to take some better photos of the Soxie sock today because yesterday’s blurry indoor pic didn’t do justice to the colours in them at all. Although I had to wait for a while because it was raining heavily.

Soxie outside

And some closeups of sections of the sock

Soxie closeup 1

I think this shot of the heel shows the colours at their best

Soxie heel

The colours are just so wild and glorious. I love them!