Cake Angels' TransFormers-Branded Chocolate Biscuit Kit

Knowing that I'm a bit of a fan of TransFormers, not to mention chocolate biscuits, my girlfriend bought me a boxed, TransFormers-branded kit for making my own choccie biccies with chocolate icing and printed wafer pieces featuring Optimus Prime and Bumblebee from the most recent TV show to carry the name "TransFormers: Robots In Disguise".

The kit contains two separate bags, containing a biscuit mix and an icing mix. The former requires only the addition of butter, the latter only a little water... and yet, despite how easy it would be to prepare, I put off making the biscuits for absolutely ages - one year, three months past its Best Before date, to be precise - before making a start. In all honesty, it probably would have been longer, and the box would have languished, untouched, in a cupboard for another few years, were it not for the obvious upset in Courtney's voice the last time the subject came up: "I bought it for you as a present..."

Part of the issue, I guess, is that I am a fan of TransFormers, but really not a fan of some of the random, licensed tat that bears the name... and a biscuit-making kit certainly falls under that banner. Still, there was no good reason for not making them, and I had the time today, so I finally cracked it open and had a go.

Both of the mixtures were quite strange to deal with. According to the instructions on the box, the icing only needed about 15ml water. Added slowly - effectively a half teaspoon at a time - I seemed to be stirring a small clump of powdery icing through a mass of pale brown, chocolate-scented icing sugar for ages, only for it to suddenly resolve itself into a thick, dark brown, glossy paste. Similarly, the 40g of room-temperature butter - cut up into small chunks so it'd soften quicker - seemed not to be blending with the cake mix at all until suddenly I had a lump of biscuit dough. Well, I say 'suddenly', but mixing it had taken absolutely ages, and both wrists were aching by the time it finally happened.

After chilling the dough in the fridge for 10 minutes, it needed rolling out - a thickness of 1cm was specified in the intructions, but I wasn't especially accurate with my rolling pin. Two stencils are printed on the back of the box, to cut out and keep (little stands are also included, to turn them into tiny standees once the biscuits are done), and these are simply laid on top of the rolled dough so they can be used to cut out one of two of each shape with a knife. The dough then needs to be balled up and re-rolled to cut out another round of biscuit shapes. The box says it makes six, and I ended up with slightly more than one biscuit's worth at the end, so I simply molded it into the shape of the stencil.

The instructions then recommend placing the biscuits onto a greased baking tray, but I object strongly to the washing up that requires, so I simply put some greaseproof paper on a cookie tray and laid the six slabs of dough on that before slamming them into the oven.

About a quarter of an hour later, the biscuits were cooked, so I took them out and let them cool briefly before battling with the icing, which preferred to stick to the spoons I was using to scoop it out of the bowl, rather than any of the biscuits. Surprisingly, there seemed to be far too much icing, and it threatened to drip over the sides of the tiny biscuits... The final touch was a case of rushing to get the wafer pieces popped out of their pre-cut sheet and slapped into the icing before it started hardening.

The end result looked like this:

Bearing in mind these were meant to be chocolate biscuits, I was a little surprised - and disappointed - to find that the flavour was more sugar than chocolate... So much sugar, in fact, that they actually left a burning sensation on my tongue and at the back of my throat. The texture left something to be desired as well - think gluten-free shortbread and you wouldn't be far off... only these were even closer to sand. There was no crunch, just crumble.

Whether this was due to being over a year past the Best Before date of the mix I'm not certain - it seems unlikely, given that such dry goods tend to last quite well. I'd say it was more due to the miniscule amout of butter, so there wasn't enough fat to properly bind the mixture and keep it moist through baking. The icing, in isolation, tasted vaguely of chocolate but, on the super-crumbly biscuit, that was all but lost. The wafers are basically puffed-up rice paper, and the print on them is very faint and faded - a shame considering the bold colours of the characters in the TV show.

I'm going to assume that these things are aimed at young kids, to give them a simple introduction to home baking (under supervision, given that a rolling pin, knife and oven are all potentially dangerous in young hands), but I can imagine a lot of kids being as disappointed as I was in the lack of chocolate flavour. I'd toyed with the idea of getting some cooking chocolate drops to add in, or maybe molding the shapes by hand, perhaps creating fewer, larger biscuits with some sculpted detail... but, in the end, I'm glad I didn't. This wasn't an especially good product, and does nothing to change my low opinion of TransFormers-branded tat... I'm sure it's reasonably lucrative, both for Hasbro and for Cake Angels... but anyone interested in making biscuits would be far better off looking up a recipe online and making them from scratch, rather than using this dry, disappointing mix.

In fact, maybe I'll do just that... I have a really good cookie recipe already, and I'm sure I could mold some vaguely TransFormer-ish shapes... Be interesting to see how they survive the baking process, though...

Delicious Failure: Makin' Cookies...

It has been absolutely ages since I did any significant cooking, but I fancied doing something special to take over to my parents' place for Christmas and, when I posed the question of what they might like, the first suggestion was a simple enough proposition that I didn't immediately regret making the offer: cookies.

A friend of mine has a recipe for something she calls 'cardiac cookies' (so named because they are potential heart attacks on a plate), in which small chunks of Snickers bars are wrapped in cookie dough and then baked. The list of ingredients is broadly similar to an average cookie recipe except for the addition of a half cup of golden syrup. I showed this recipe to my girlfriend and watched as panic, then horror worked their way around her face.

"Isn't there a bit too much sugar?" she enquired, nervously. "But, surely, that's the whole point!" retorted I in a jovial tone. Nevertheless, she remained uneasy...

A quick web search turned up several different options, the most likely of which was Millie's Cookies recipe, courtesy of the BBC Good Food website. It's a very simple recipe and cooks - according to their instructions - in about 10 minutes. That sounded just about perfect, but the recipe was a basic chocolate chip cookie, and I wanted something a bit more Christmassy.

The obvious option was white chocolate and cranberry (because why not shoehorn in "one of your five-a-day" into such a wholesome snack? There was a better than average chance my niece was going to have at least one, and she already has heart troubles), with a little extra something sprinkled on top. This 'something extra' was to be decided upon while browsing the Baking section of the local Morrisons (scene of many of my more whimsical purchases) and ended up being little white chocolate stars.

I also made one tiny addition to the ingredients, in the form of about a half teaspoon of cinnamon for this first batch of cookies, so I'll list all the ingredients just for convenience.

Cookies Attempt 1: The Christmas Sugar Rush

Ingredients:

• 225g Self-Raising Flour
• 125g Softened Butter (either leave it out of the fridge for a few hours or just microwave it - coincidentally, I did that in a dream recently, and seemed to think it went rather well...)
• 125g Caster Sugar
• 100g Dark Brown Soft Sugar (the original recipe actually calls for light brown, but I had some Tate & Lyle Fairtrade stuff in my cupboard)
• 100g White Chocolate Chips
• 100g Dried Cranberries
• 1 Egg
• 1tsp Vanilla Extract
• 1/2tsp Salt
• 1/2tsp Cinnamon (not required, but certainly adds to the flavour!)
• White Chocolate Stars (sufficient to scatter artistically atop the cooling cookies)

Preparation Time: about 10-30 minutes to mix it all up (depending largely on the state of the butter and the strength of your wrists!), then about 10 minutes to cook, allegedly...

Tools Required:

• 1 Large Bowl, for mixing everything
• 1 Small Bowl, for combining the flour, salt and - if you're using it - cinnamon
• 1 Teacup, in which to beat the egg
• 1 Sieve
• 1 Baking Tray or Biscuit Tray
• Greaseproof Paper (to line the tray)
• Mixing Implement of Choice

The Process:
As is often the case, it's wise to pre-heat the oven - about 180ºC for a fan assisted oven should be perfect - though you may want to leave it till the dough is ready to be separated into chunks as mixing it can take longer than the average oven these days takes to warm up.

Dump the two lots of sugar and the softened butter into your bowl and mix them up till you have a thick paste. I gather this is called 'creaming'. The first time we made cookies, my girlfriend did the lion's share as my wrists - weakened as they are by a deskbound day job - just could not cope. For the second set of cookies, I set to work while my girlfriend was out, and had to do it in several stages. Once 'creamed', lightly beat the egg and add it into the bowl along with the vanilla extract, mixing in thoroughly.

In another bowl, add the salt and cinnamon to the flour, then sift this melange into the main bowl via the sieve, mixing it all into what will become delicious cookie dough. Try not to eat it at this stage.

No, really, do try. Have patience: the cookies really are worth the wait.

Once the dough is sorted, add in the chocolate chips and dried cranberries, mixing them in as thoroughly as possible, considering the dough is pretty darned tough. Divide the dough up into about twelve parts and lay them on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. The original recipe claims that 7 minutes will be enough for the 'soft, doughy cookie' experience, while 10 minutes will just start to make them crisp around the edges. In the real world, it just comes down to how long you can bear to postpone the inevitable guzzling of your home-baked wonder-cookies.

Remove the baking tray from the oven then scatter the white chocolate stars over the top while the cookies are hot enough to soften the chocolate sufficiently that they adhere, but not so hot they just turn into vaguely star-shaped puddles of white chocolate, then leave to cool on the tray for a minute or so. Finally, transfer to a wire rack to cool fully. Or just eat them warm. It's your call.

The Results:
Sadly I didn't think to photograph this set of cookies, but they turned out rather well. Considering how large the chunks of dough ended up (far larger than 'walnut size', I can tell you!) they didn't merge into one ginormous, tray-sized Mega-Cookie, even though they flattened out nicely. Weirdly, I think they ended up in the oven for a little over ten minutes, but they remained soft and moist.

The addition of cinnamon gave them a slightly more Christmassy feel, and the white chocolate and cranberries complemented each other well. I think I delayed rather too long in adding the white chocolate stars over the top, as they tended to fall off rather easily, but the cookies went down well with my family. In fact, I left them over there, as my sister wanted to take some home with her.

Cookies Attempt 2: I Can See Rainbows...

This second set is a bit more recent - just yesterday, in fact. I'd been wanting to take another swing at making cookies ever since Christmas and, this time, wanted to do it all myself rather than wimping out and letting my girlfriend deal with most of it. Rather than just repeat exactly the same process, though, I wanted to try something else as the 'added ingredient'...

Ingredients:
The same as above, except:

• Forgot to add the cinnamon, damnit!
• Used Skittles instead of white chocolate chips and cranberries
• No white chocolate stars

Preparation Time: Far too long because I'm so out of practice in mixing things, even though the butter had been out for about 5 hours or so by the time I remembered I wanted to make cookies. 10 minutes in the oven.

Tools Required:
As above!

The Process:
Creaming the sugars actually got quite painful because it's been so long since I did anything like this... and, honestly, the last time I made meringue, I used an electric whisk. Since I spend most of my days with my hands poised over a keyboard and/or mouse, I'm afraid my wrists are wasting away.

Nevertheless, doing a little creaming punctuated by short breaks where I stifled cries of agony, I eventually managed to get to the stage of adding the egg and vanilla, and then the sifting-in of the flour and salt. As mentioned above, I forgot about the cinnamon until the dough was complete, which was pretty annoying. Ho hum.

My original thought had been to add little chunks of caramel or something similar but, while in Morrisons, my eyes alighted upon the bags of sweets in their confectionary aisle and, while I couldn't find caramel, I was intrigued by the possibility of adding Skittles to cookies. It may sound strange - and certainly my girlfriend cautioned against it - but if one can add Smarties/M&Ms to cookies, one can certainly add Skittles... and I had to increase the sugar content somehow, right? I didn't want my cookies, made entirely with my own hands, to be bland, did I?

So I dumped in about half a (174g) bag and mixed them in, then divided the dough into twelve more-or-less equal chunks, and placed them on the greaseproof paper-lined baking tray, as before. I set the kitchen timer for ten minutes and slammed the tray into the oven, planning to check in on the cookies at the seven minute mark.

Annoyingly, before even that point, they had spread and merged together, but still seemed far too soft to bring out of the oven. By the time the timer's alarm went off, the cookies were all golden around the edges, and one was even starting to look a little burnt in one corner.

The Results:
What I probably should have done was give the tray a half-turn, then put it back in for another 7 minutes or so, because the cookies I made all by myself were a little bit too moist and doughy at the end. They also adhered to the greaseproof paper rather too well, so they basically all broke as they were pulled off.

The lack in cinnamon didn't have too detrimental an effect on the flavour of the cookies - in fact, the fruity flavour of the Skittles managed to fool my girlfriend into thinking the cinnamon was in there. It didn't work quite as well for me, but they were certainly very tasty... if a little bland compared to the Christmas cookies.

I did manage to get photos of these, but only after my girlfriend and I had sampled some:

The day after I made these, they'd more or less reached the stage of behaving like proper cookies, though they still only reluctantly parted from the greaseproof paper.

And, yes, Skittles cookies are the Breakfast of Champions.

Chocolate Chip Not-Cross Buns

Yes, it's been an absolute age since I last posted here, and I'm very sorry for that. For one reason or another, I've lacked time and motivation to do write-ups of lots of things cooked over the last few months, and it needed something very special to get me back in the mood. Also, due to going back into full-time employment, I've been making use of a lot of ready-meals in the evenings... most of which didn't really warrant a review.

And, hey, let's face it, it's unusual enough for me to make event-specific foodstuffs and actually write about them on the day, rather than a good week or two later.

So, without further ado... a somewhat secular and chocolate-oriented take on the Hot Cross Bun. The recipe upon which this is based came from the Cadbury Kitchen but, as is de rigueur in my kitchen, I didn't follow it precisely for several reasons, ranging from forgetting to buy some ingredients (such as 'mixed spice') to personal preference (my girlfriend is vegetarian, and so we decided against adding the gelatin-based glaze). Also, since the crosses aren't the most interesting part of the recipe (and adding them involves the use of a piping bag, so I couldn't be bothered with the fuss), they were made without.

Considering this is the first proper baking project I've undertaken in a while, and it involved mixing things up from scratch rather than using a pre-prepared bread/cake mix, it all went fairly smoothly, too...

I've left the formatting in the US-style 'cup' measures because it's easy enough to find such cups these days - my nearest Morrisons has them in its Kitchenware section, and I believe they're available at the likes of Waitrose and Lakeland. The ingredients listed below are sufficient for 12 decent-sized (ie. larger than the sort of thing you can buy in a supermarket) buns.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups Plain Flour (plus a dusting for a worktop during the kneading stage)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons Cinnamon
• 14g Dried Yeast (ie. 2 sachets @ 7g each)
• 1/4 cup Caster Sugar
• 300ml Milk (room temperature)
• 2 Eggs
• 1 cup Sultanas
• 3/4 cup Chocolate Chips (I used a single 100g bag of Morrisons Dark Chocolate Chips)
• Butter (for greasing a baking tray)

Preparation Time: about 20 minutes (plus rising time) to prepare the dough, then about 20 minutes to cook

Tools Required:

• Large Mixing Bowl (for the dough mix)
• Small Mixing Bowl (in which to beat the eggs)
• Measuring Cups (obviously)
• Measuring Jug (for the milk) 
• Spatula/Flat-Bladed Knife (to mix the dough - I used a Pampered Chef jar scraper... it was the closest thing I had!)
• Whisk or Mixing Implement of Choice (for the eggs)
• Sharp Knife (for dividing the dough)
• Cling Film
• Baking Tray (Foil optional)

The Process:
First off, I measured out the flour, cinnamon and sugar. These were dumped into a large mixing bowl with the yeast and stirred with an Alien chopstick, because it was handy. The eggs were cracked into a small bowl and lightly beaten with a cute little semi-automatic whisk thing I picked up in a nearby branch of Tiger (interesting aside - sometime before Christmas, there was a market in Harrow at which one of the stalls was selling a similar product, perhaps slightly more refined, at almost four times the price, but 'specially reduced' to only about twice the price for the market event), then poured it into the flour mixture. As my girlfriend started stirring it all together, I added the milk gradually, in small stages. The original recipe calls for 350ml of milk, but we found that rather excessive - the dough was coming together very nicely by about the 300ml mark, so the excess was returned to the bottle. At the point where the mixture started to become a cohesive 'dough', I added in the sultanas, then the chocolate chips (conveniently, a 100g bag from Morrisons is pretty much bang-on 3/4 of a cup), then took over for the final stage of stirring, where it started to become both sticky and a little stiff.

Once all the flour mixture had been fully absorbed into the dough, it was turned out onto a section of worktop that had been dusted with flour. I kneaded the dough for somewhere between five and ten minutes, by which time it had become somewhat less sticky (though I wondered if, perhaps, I should not have washed my hands directly before kneading, because so much of the dough remained stuck to my fingers). Then it was dumped back into the mixing bowl, covered over with Cling Film and left to rise for about an hour.

After that time, the dough had more-or-less doubled in size. The original instructions stated that it should be beaten back to its original size, but I'm not sure how well I accomplished that. I kneaded it again briefly, then rolled and stretched it to make it easier to cut into twelve reasonably-similar-sized pieces. While I was doing this, my girlfriend laid out a piece of foil on a baking tray (largely because it's looking a bit manky with age and use, and it's often easier to dispose of a layer of foil than it is to adequately clean the tray) and smeared it with butter to prevent the buns sticking. Once the twelve pieces were laid out, the tray was covered with cling film and left for a second round of rising, for about 30 minutes. The ideal result is that the buns double in size, squishing together on the tray for that authentic 'group of freshly-baked buns' look. At around the 20 minute mark, the oven was switched on and set to 190C.

At the half-hour mark, and since we weren't decorating the buns in any way, they went straight into the oven for 20 minutes. While they looked, if anything, a little burnt (particularly at either side of the tray) they were briefly tested - by sticking a chopstick into one of the middle buns - to ensure they were thoroughly cooked.

The Results:
We had one bun each after leaving them to cool only briefly, because there are few things nicer than a hot bun (and, after all, they're called 'hot cross buns' because they're meant to be eaten hot). We're both of a mind that they could have done with a bit more cinnamon (perhaps the 'mixed spice' would have offered a more substantial flavour) but, otherwise, the buns tasted good - not too dry, though the chocolate (which, naturally, melted slightly) and the sultanas went some way to keeping them moist.

Those that appeared burnt actually seem to be OK, which got me wondering if the glaze is actually a fairly important component for this kind of bun... After all, hot cross buns are noted for being well browned,  with a glossy finish that moistens the crust.

I'm pretty pleased with the results and may well try this recipe with alternative additions... though I'll likely steer well clear of candied peel - a staple in 'normal' hot cross buns - because I'm not especially keen on that stuff. A mix of sultanas and raisins, or ginger, or something wacky like popping candy might be worth a try. Certainly, the next batch will have two teaspoons of cinnamon, if I use any at all.

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Culinary Shenanigans

I've been toying with the idea of backdating this post so it appears on the 23rd November rather than today, but realised there's so sense in trying to rewrite the timeline of this blog. It would have been nice to have posted this over the Doctor Who Anniversary Weekend but the content this post deals with was actually made over the course of the 23rd and 24th anyway, while the plan was to make up some cupcakes and some truffles, then scoff them all while watching the 50th Anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor.

So... Just over a week late, here's what happened...

My girlfriend had previously brought round a whole stock of Lakeland's exclusive Doctor Who silicon cake pans and ice cube molds, as well as the Dalek cupcake wraps and toppers (colourful ones, based on the New Dalek Paradigm). All we needed was some food colouring (red, orange and blue) and a piping bag, and we'd be well on our way to making a selection of Dalektable* cupcakes to gobble up whilst glued to the screen. I also suggested using the ice cube tray to make some Doctor Who truffles, since it's been a while since I last larked about with chocolate.

It didn't all go smoothly... The first problem was that the Morrisons where I now do my usual weekly shop didn't seem to stock any red food colouring. I'd have expected blue to be hard to find because it's quite a weird colour for food, while red is surely pretty common these days. In the end, I had to make a brief second trip out, to my local Sainsbury's, to get the red colouring.

Next up, while the cakes themselves worked out very well - we just made twelve using two standard cake pans rather than the silicon molds (they're not as well-suited to having icing piled on, since the character designs on top would be covered over) - the icing was where it started to go wrong. Perhaps I should have known better than to expect a £2 piping bag to hold together, but the darned thing started to split before we'd even done three of the cakes, and was completely unusable by the time I finished the first six. We ended up only producing plain vanilla icing because of this, when the plan had been to (hopefully) make three of each colour.

Now, granted, I used ready-made Betty Crocker icing... but it had been out of the fridge for most of the day, and was easily soft enough to be piped right from the start. The piping bag I bought had a very thin heat-sealed seam, and split gradually further as I worked, even though the icing only got softer while the bag was in my hands. I'd have taken it back were it not for the fact that I already had a piping bag I wasn't aware of, and this new one came with seven nice, metal nozzles, which are a massive improvement on the three crappy plastic ones that had been packaged with the other bag. A quick switch-around, and I'll be ready to pipe icing again next time...

Thinking about it in retrospect, making three extra colours of icing would have required an awful lot more time than we allowed for the project, since the piping bag would have needed washing out after each group of three had been iced. As it was, we finished these just in time to start making our dinner, which was then ready just in time for the Doctor Who special.

Still, they turned out OK... and the two plates of cupcakes were further decorated with Jelly Babies, in a nod to a certain former Doctor who made an unexpected appearance in the show.

---

The truffles were also not quite right. Where my previous attempts used bricks of Willie's Cacao chocolate, shattered by hand, we tried an easier option this time: bars of Fairtrade 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate.

That it was far easier to melt should have clued me in to its vastly different makeup - far more cocoa butter, for one thing - and the final mixture of chocolate, butter, honey and egg yolk was much runnier than any previous truffle mixture I've made. This did make it easier to pour into the mold - which is always good - and it still set perfectly well - which is also good - but the truffles ended up much, much sweeter than I'd have hoped. It's not that the honey was the most potent flavour, but it certainly came close and, without the coating of cocoa powder, these could have been almost unbearably syrupy. As it was, I could only eat a couple at a time... which was, I suppose, true of the last batch of truffles I made, just for a very different reason.

The molds were Daleks (naturally), the TARDIS (just as naturally) and K-9. All were reasonably detailed molds, and the truffles came out with minimal breakage (the Daleks' dome lights broke off quite easily, as did the lantern on the roof of the TARDIS, but the bulk of the detail came out well. Dumping them all in cocoa filled in a lot of these details - most annoyingly the 'K-9' lettering on the side of the robot dog and many of the TARDIS window panes - but the end result turned out well... And the truffle mixture left over from the nine molded characters went on to make at least a dozen 'balls' of truffle.

* Excellent food/Doctor Who pun courtesy of my girlfriend

Another Version of the Truth Cupcake

OK, it's not as if I'm trying to prove a point here... I merely found myself with a bag of Wright's Chocolate Cake mix, and an intense desire to make cupcakes.

It could happen to anyone.

Of course, cake mix alone does not make a cupcake. I had to go shopping for the extras. This isn't going to be a proper recipe because everything was ready made - all I did was mix it together and stick it in the oven - but I shall nevertheless list the extras that were acquired specifically for this experiment:

• Chocolate Chunks (I used Dr. Oetker milk chocolate - 100g bag, of which about half was added to the cake mix
• Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge Rich & Creamy Icing
• Cupcake Cases (also Dr. Oetker, in my case)
• Chocolate Pieces (for topping the cakes - I used Fiddes Payne Chocoholic's Delight - "a selection of chocolate and chocolate flavoured pieces for ice cream, cakes and desserts")

Essentially, this is just like any of my 7 Days of Baking challenges, such as the chocolate cake, but with the mix spooned into the cupcake cases, sitting in a muffin tray. Smaller cakes don't need the same time in the oven - I found a tray of six was nicely done in about half an hour... rather longer than expected, but since one bag of the Wright's cake mix is enough for approximately 12 decent-sized cakes, and I only have one tray of six, it evens out to an hour's cooking time for the whole lot... Coincidence, or another fine example of how precise things can be, when it comes to cooking?

Once each batch was done, I allowed them to cool for rather longer than necessary because I was distracted. Ahem. When I got back to it, the cakes had cooled sufficiently, and the icing was suitably soft and easy to apply with a knife. That done, I had to choose how to top the cakes.

The selection offered by Chocoholic's Delight is: milk chocolate drops, white chocolate drops, chocolate flavour flakes and chocolate flavour strands. Since the cakes all contained milk chocolate chunks, adding milk chocolate drops to the icing would seem like gratuitous cupcake-encapsulated tautology, so those remain unused (for the moment - chocolate rarely stays that way for long in my possession!). Throwing caution to the wind (and a few chocolate pieces all over my kitchen) I lined up the cakes on a baking tray and simply sprinkled the drops, flakes and strands each over a row of four cakes, then slapped the tray into my (hastily reorganised) fridge overnight.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are what one calls 'cupcakes':

Admit it, you feel your arteries clogging just looking at these puppies, don't you?

I must confess that the cake mix I used was five months beyond its Use By date, so it was rather past its prime... but the resultant cakes are nevertheless moist and tasty.

And also kind of chocolate overload.

I'd hoped to take some of these into work today, but I didn't have a clean container large enough to accommodate more than three... which is pretty crap... So, here I am, stuck with nine cupcakes (no, your eyes do not deceive you: the photo above was taken before dinner today), and no-one to share 'em with.

Oh, my the hardship...

Fear not, gentle reader... somehow, I shall manage...

A Cautionary Tale...

...About Molding Your Truffles

Over the recent Easter Bank Holiday, I decided to make some more truffles, intending to take a stock to my parents' home to share them out. There were a couple of things I did differently this time, though. Some by choice, and some out of necessity and/or pig-headedness.

To take the latter points first, my original recipe calls for runny honey to sweeten the chocolate. Sometime since then, however, I've used my runny honey for other things, didn't restock my cupboards, and so I no longer had sufficient for the mixture as specified, and in any case wanted to increase the honey content to better counter the extreme bitterness of the 100% Javan Cacao chocolate I'd picked up for this batch. I didn't want to resort to sugar, because that would introduce the risk of graininess, should the crystals not dissolve thoroughly. Sure, there's plenty of icing sugar, but I wasn't sure how that would affect the consistency, and I didn't want to be too experimental with this batch. My eyes alighted next on a tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup. Problem solved. On this occasion, I added something more than 100ml.

Other than the different origin of the cacao, the only deliberate change was the use of ice-cube molds to create a batch of neatly shaped and consistent truffles, to go along with my gloriously cock-eyed, hand-molded blobs... and therein, the problems began...

Initially, I was looking for either soft plastic or rubber confectionary molds, and preferably as shallow as possible. Sadly, my local shops had nothing suitable, and I didn't fancy traipsing off to one of the bigger shopping centres because I'd left everything to the last minute (which, facing facts, is the only way to do truffles of this recipe, since it involves raw egg yolk), so I grabbed a set of three ice-cube molds from a local pound shop.

The increased liquid content of the mixture led to a rather runnier final product, which made it all the easier to pour it into the molds, but it had struck me that getting them out again might well be a problem. With a more viscous mixture, oil or cocoa power could have been applied to the mold. As it stood, either would just have been absorbed and become useless.

And, as it turned out, I was right to worry. When I pulled the trays out of the fridge later on, the truffles were very much stuck inside the molds, and the rigidity of the plastic meant that they weren't easily displaced. The obvious next step was to stick them in the freezer, and use the old 'warm water' trick to get them out once they were rather more solid.

Only they didn't become more solid. Something about the truffle mixture resists proper freezing and just stops at the 'properly set' state. Thus, even after leaving the three trays in the freezer for a few days and then running warm water over the backs, the truffles still didn't want to come out.

In the end, I figured I might as well give in and just use a spoon to extract them...

Very much a work in progress. Two trays to go...
Oh my, the hardship...

Last Course: Mint Chocolate Truffle Tart

Because, let's face it, once you've made truffles, the logical progression is "How would that work in a tart?"

I'd actually intended to write up a Waitrose chocolate tart (the seriously tautological 'Seriously Chocolatey Tarte au Chocolat'), but took so long to get my head together during one of my quiet, non-blogging patches that I'd basically forgotten what it was like. Consider this not just an alternative, but a home-made spin on the same theme.

This is much the same process as making truffles, but the quantities and proportions of ingredients were altered, basically by guesstimate. So, without further ado...

Ingredients:

• 300g Dark Chocolate (I used 2 bars of Green & Blacks Organic Dark Cooks' Chocolate this time round, for convenience - 72% cocoa, "made with finest Trinitario cocoa beans with extra cocoa butter for easier melting", each bar made up of 30 5g pieces)
• 90g Unsalted Butter
• 80ml Runny Honey (the same Sainsbury's 'Light & Mild' Acacia as last time)
• 3 Large Egg Yolks
• Peppermint Extract (2 teaspoons, I used Star Kay White's Pure Peppermint Extract)
• Waitrose Sweet Pastry Case
• Cocoa Powder & Icing Sugar (optional, as decoration)

Preparation Time: About 10 minutes mixing, then just chill in refrigerator till serving time

Tools Required:

• Microwave
• Microwave-Safe Bowl
• Jar Scraper or similar (for stirring and smoothing out the mixture in the pastry case)
• Measuring Implements (cups, scales, etc.)
• 2 Small Cups/Glasses (for separating the eggs)

The Process:
Break up the chocolate bars into the bowl, then blast in the microwave, set to medium, for 30 seconds at a time, mixing with the jar scraper each time. This Green & Black's chocolate melted far more easily than Willie's, thanks to that 'extra cocoa butter'. On this occasion, I also gave the butter some time in the microwave, which made it even easier to stir into the chocolate. In fact, I was able to dump the whole 90g into the chocolate in one hit, and it really didn't take long for the few remaining lumps to melt in.

Slightly more honey was used for this version of the mixture but, considering the Green & Black's cooking chocolate is sweeter than Willies in its raw form, this isn't strictly necessary... In fact, it's entirely possible you could do without. Make sure to stir it in thoroughly if you are using it.

Add the mint extract next. Being alcohol-based, the Star Kay White stuff I used here took a lot of stirring to mix in properly - it seemed to want to just stay on the surface of the mixture. In fact, all things considered, the addition of this particular mint extract is the only reason the mixture took as long as it did to prepare!

Finally, as with the truffle mixture, separate and add in 3 (slightly beaten) egg yolks. The mixture should begin to thicken up noticeably. When it's all mixed together thoroughly, pour it directly into the pastry case. If you're lucky, the quantities listed above will leave you with enough mixture for about 10 minty truffles, so refrigerate any leftovers right along with the tart.

For an extra finishing touch, mix up some cocoa powder and icing sugar to sprinkle over the tart. The remains can be mopped up by whatever truffles you make.

The Results:
Confession time: this is another recipe where the quantities I've given above have been adjusted as a result of my efforts. I used more honey and only two egg yolks and the result was OK, but not quite right. Certainly, I used far too much honey (100ml, just for the record) and that, coupled with the mint, reduced the impact of the flavour of the chocolate. It still tasted like mint chocolate, and the mint was actually quite subtle... but excess honey coupled with the lower cocoa content in the chocolate didn't do the finished product any favours. 80ml is only a third again more than the quantity used for the truffles, so it should offer a more balaced sweetness. I also only used 2 eggs, and immediately realised my mistake when the mixture didn't gain the same initial texture as my truffle mix. Based on the approximate proportions, I determined that one egg yolk is needed for every 100g of chocolate melted, hence 3 yolks for 2 bars worth of chocolate. I toyed with the idea of breaking and separating another egg when I made this, but didn't want to risk it so late in the process.

I would also add that Waitrose ready-made Sweet Pastry Case is probably a bit too thick, dry and biscuity for this tart. Something a bit more buttery and soft would have worked better... and having less of it would have been a bonus, too, because the ready-made case is actually quite a thick crust.

All that said, this turned out to be quite a pleasant minty-chocolatey dessert. My parents were the first to sample it, and gave a generally favourable review, though it was a little tough to cut straight from the fridge (furthermore, my father would have preferred it without any kind of pastry case, but that would have made it one whopping great truffle, rather than a tart). Considering how ridiculously easy this is to make, and the vast range of ready-flavoured Green & Black's chocolate on the market (why didn't I just buy their mint chocolate?), there are many variations on this theme to be tried and, while I am certain to try some of them in future, they may not get such a thorough write-up.

This is actually a rather more extensive coverage with cocoa/icing sugar than I'd originally intended but, after a couple of accidents where great clumps of the stuff fell onto the tart, I decided I'd just spread the stuff around, rather than even try to make it look 'natural'. In retrospect, I probably didn't need to mix icing sugar into this batch, because the tart itself turned out sweeter than I'd expected.

And, of course, the leftovers went to make these:

And very nice they were, too.

Great Scott! Did I Just Make Truffles?!

Some years ago, I worked in a certain trendy part of west London (you know the one - it was the title of a movie starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts). Down one road right near the office was a shop specialising in high-quality and hand-made foods. One of their specialities was the little boxes of the most awesome chocolate truffles I've ever tried. If ever there was a special occasion in the office, I'd head down and pick up some truffles to share out (or several small boxes to hand out to my team before Christmas).

This little experiment (because I surely cannot claim I expected it to go well) came about because I was pretty sure that cream was not an ingredient of truffles, but the recipe I had to hand - not to mention many, many more I found online - all listed varying proportions of double cream or whipping cream as the major component. Now, conceivably, this is because proper chocolate - of the kind I've used below - is both very rich and very bitter. Cream will smooth that out, but if you go looking for traditional truffle recipes, cream is among the many things you will not find.

Ingredients:

• 180g Dark Chocolate (I used Willie's Supreme Cacao Venezuelan Black, Caranero Superior - 100% Pure Cacao!)
• 80g Unsalted Butter (cubed, and at room temperature, not straight from the fridge!)
• 60ml Runny Honey (I used 'Light & Mild' Acacia honey from Sainsbury's)
• 2 Large Egg Yolks
• Cocoa Powder
• Icing Sugar (optional, but recommended with this dark chocolate!)

Preparation Time: About 10 minutes mixing, 1-2hrs refrigeration, then about 10-20 minutes to make the individual truffles.

Tools Required:

• Large Kitchen Knife (to break up the chocolate)
• Microwave
• Microwave-Safe Bowl
• Jar Scraper or similar (for stirring)
• Measuring Implements (cups, scales, etc.)
• 2 Small Cups/Glasses (for separating the eggs)
• Small Bowl (for coating truffles in cocoa)
• Cling Film
• Small Ice-Cream Scoop or Tablespoon

The Process:
There are two ways to melt chocolate - putting it in a bowl over a pan of boiling water... or putting it in a bowl and blasting it in the microwave. Either way, it has to be broken up and, when working with bricks of Willie's chocolate, the best way seems to be to just get all Norman Bates on it. Stick the brick into a bowl, and channel your inner Mr. Stabby with a large kitchen knife. Ideally, the chunks should be of a reasonably consistent size but, until Willie's get their act together and start making their chocolate into bars that are easily breakable into more-or-less identical chunks, like everybody else, you'll just have to live with random fragments and little splinters.

Heating the chocolate is a very delicate matter. Set the microwave to medium power, and heat the fragmented chocolate for 30 seconds at a time, stirring with a jar scraper each time, because it won't be immediately obvious how well it's melting. Once the whole lot is in a liquid state (should take about 5 minutes, overall), add in the butter a few cubes at a time, and stir till it's completely incorporated. Depending on how soft the butter is, you may need to put the mixture back in the microwave for another 30 seconds to ensure its warm enough to mix in the whole lot. Alternatively, warm the butter separately in the microwave beforehand.

Once the butter is all in, add the honey and stir thoroughly. Finally, add the egg yolks and - you guessed it - stir thoroughly. At this final stage, the mixture will thicken dramatically, almost becoming like dough. When it seems consistent (though, I found, rather grainy-looking), set it aside to cool for a while, then cover the bowl with cling film and refrigerate for an hour or two.

An interesting aside at this point is that some recipes you'll find online will refer to this mixture as a 'ganache'. This is inaccurate. A ganache is the result of pouring hot cream over chocolate, then stirring till smooth. You will notice the absence of cream in the above recipe. Also not to be confused with Ganesh, who is a Hindu deity.

Once the mixture has cooled, grab it out of the fridge. Pour some of the cocoa powder into a small bowl, then mix in some icing sugar to sweeten it up. Scoop out some of the truffle mixture and mold into as regular a ball as you can be bothered with, then drop it into the bowl and shake around to get an even coating.

Finished truffles should be stored in the fridge in an airtight container, and should last about a week.

The Results:
When I saw what happened to the mixture when the egg went in, I thought I had a disaster on my hands. I'd done a fair bit of research on truffle recipes (the trick, unless you're going for the cream-based, ganache type, is to search for 'traditional truffle recipe', or just go the whole hog and add 'egg yolk' into the search terms) and most of them refer to the mixture being smooth... but only up to the point where the egg goes in... then the descriptions are conspicuous by their absence.

I did find that the mixture was tougher around the edges of the bowl when it came out of the fridge (big surprise - mixture hardens when cold... edges are coldest. Duh.) and I couldn't keep the size of each scoop consistent to save my life but, hey, "cock-eyed" is just another way of saying "lovingly hand-made" in my books.

Or something.

In retrospect, I think I should have added more honey to the mix. The finished truffles were rather bitter. That said, I actually forgot to mix the icing sugar in with my cocoa, so the coating was pure cocoa until I decided - as a last resort patch-job - to sprinkle some icing sugar over the top of the finished truffles. Alternatively, it's quite common to add some kind of additional flavouring - anything from liqueurs to chilli.

Texture-wise, they turned out far smoother than I'd expected from the dough-like final mixture, but I will concede that cream would make them smoother still, and reduce the bitterness of 100% cocoa chocolate. The quantities listed should give you at least 30 good-sized truffles, so this would be a great thing to try over a weekend, so that any leftovers ("enjoy responsibly" as the ad goes) can be taken to work on Monday and shared around.

Go on, you know you want to.

Also, 'lovingly hand-made' truffles make the perfect Valentine's gift, gentlemen. You're welcome.

7 Days of Baking: Day 4 - Wright's Chocolate Cake

OK, people, stand by to be stunned.

My confidence boosted by the positive outcome of the Wright's toffee cake, I set about planning something even more elaborate for the chocolate version. Conveniently, I'd been invited to lunch with a friend and former colleague and, having been informed that I would be providing dessert, I had all the additional motivation I needed to attempt something exceptional - and memorable - for the occasion.

The plan, in essence, was quite simple. I'd picked up a couple of tubs of Betty Crocker icing, and already had a couple of blocks of Willie's Cacao Venezuelan Black 100% Cacao chocolate lurking in my fridge, daring me to use them. I was a little nervous about icing another round cake, because the toffee cake ended up rather cock-eyed, but equally didn't want to give up on icing altogether. Thinking that the standard loaf would be easier to coat, I decided to break off some chunks of the chocolate to add to the cake mix, then cover the end result in the Betty Crocker chocolate fudge icing... Then, on a whim, and after the cake was baked, I cut the darned thing in half with my Lakeland cake leveller, and slathered on some of the vanilla icing to make it a sandwich... then, having completed the icing, I had another whim...  

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Ingredients:

• Wright's Chocolate Cake Mix
• Water
• Cooking Oil
• Willie's Cacao Venezuelan Black 100% Cacao Chocolate (about 1/4 block broken up)
• Betty Crocker Buttercream Style Vanilla Icing
• Betty Crocker Rich & Creamy Chocolate Fudge Icing

Preparation Time: Just over an hour

Tools Required:

• Medium/Large Bowl (for the mixing)
• Whisk (or electric mixer, if you're lazier than I am, also for the mixing)
• Baking Tin (2lb loaf size - paper liners optional)
• Measuring Implements (jug for the water, tablespoons or similar for oil)
• Cooling Rack
• Table Knife (for breaking up the chocolate and spreading the icing)
• Grater
• Foil (upon which to rest the cake, for ease of storage)

The Process:
I shan't bore you all by reiterating the same old instructions which are, in any case, very clearly stated on Wright's packaging. Instead, I shall focus on the embellishments. Taking one brick of Willie's Cacao chocolate, I broke up about 1/4 of the brick in rough, random sizes, ranging from tiny shavings to generous nuggets, which were then tipped into the cake mix and thoroughly stirred in. Regular chunks may have been fairer, but I rather liked the idea that one slice might have small morsels of this most decadent chocolate, while others... might end up with rather more. Never underestimate the power of expectation in your chocolate cake.

Or anything else.

I took the cake out of the oven at the 50 minute mark, since my experience with previous cakes suggested this was the point at which the cake was basically done, and any extra time would just harden the crust - not what I was aiming for with this particular dessert. This proved to have been a very good move, as the Lakeland leveller cut through easily and smoothly - thankfully and miraculously missing all the chocolate chunks!

The halves were allowed to cool briefly (5-10 minutes) before the vanilla icing was spread on the bottom half, the cake stuck back together, placed on a sheet of foil, and the chocolate fudge icing plastered munificently all over the whole thing.

And, for a fraction of a second, I thought my work was done.

Then I looked at the remaining Willie's chocolate, and remembered that I had a grater stashed away in one of my cupboards.

Yes, gentle reader, I grated some more chocolate over the top of the iced cake. When it comes to chocolate, I know neither shame nor restraint.

I really wish I'd thought to take photos of that cake because, by God, it was a thing of opulent beauty.

The Results:
Because, let's face it, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

When it was served up after a wonderful lamb lunch (with wine! How civilised!), straight from the fridge, it was cut into small slices but, frankly, with a chocolate cake that rich, even without the additional chocolate clumps, even without the smooth, delicious icing, large slices could have proved dangerously epicurean.

The cake was light, spongy, moist, and very thoroughly chocolaty in and of itself... Even in batter form, the scent of chocolate was very pleasantly strong. A single mouthful of this completed cake could contain smooth, rich icing in both Vanilla and Chocolate Fudge flavours, shavings of 100% cacao chocolate, and lavish quantities of solid chocolate. I had been worried that 100% cacao might be a bit much, and possibly detract from the overall experience, but I couldn't have been more wrong. On its own, the Willie's chocolate is too strong to consume in significant quantities, but buffered within the cake, and along with the icing, it was a perfect fit - it didn't overload the cake, and the cake didn't blanket the chocolate.

Despite the mix of different products - Wright's, Betty Crocker and Willie's - the sum of the parts was, if I do say so myself, mind-blowingly good. So much so, in fact, that I had to offer the remains to my host, the other guest and, upon my next visit home, to my parents (apparently I did no such thing... apologies, Mum & Dad. I'll do another one soon!), lest I try to live solely on its chocolaty, ambrosial goodness.

My host politely declined, pleading for her waistline (Hah! Sorry, Alex, but you are sooooo far from being fat), the other guest happily accepted with no such qualms, and my parents are always pleased to find a home for anything cake-like - the embellishments were, metaphorically speaking, the cherry on top.

Or, more literally, the icing on the cake. Ahem.

I would heartily recommend that you invent an occasion for which to bake this cake...  

...Just remember to share.

Last Course: Cadbury's Hot Chocolate Orange Pudding (2-pack)

It's actually slightly bizarre that, when I go shopping, I spend very little time in the dessert aisles. Granted, most of my local shops have a paltry selection, but even when I go further afield, my fridge is filled up with main courses rather than puddings.

This purchase was something of a whim... I saw it, it sounded interesting, I thought I'd give it a go. It's one of those desserts that comes in small plastic pots (supposedly individual servings, but what kind of miser doles out servings this small from a home-made dessert? I've seen larger portions in a central London restaurant!) that just need a minute at full blast in the microwave to make them ready to serve.

And I have so say, portion sizes aside, it's an excellent idea, and a great convenience... there are a great many ranges of such desserts - frequently in 2-packs (which basically makes for about one proper snacks & the single man serving per pack), so chocolate sponge with a Cadbury's chocolate orange sauce sounds pretty much like a no-brainer, right?

As far as it goes, yes... the sponge is wonderfully moist, not excessively gummy, and has a subtly chocolate flavour - chocolate flavour sponges do sometimes overdo it somewhat with the flavouring - and the orange tang of the sauce complements it perfectly. It's not overly sweet, the balance of chocolate/orange flavour is pretty much spot-on, the sauce is perfectly smooth and didn't seem to develop a skin as it cooled. There's just enough of it to get a taste of sauce with every mouthful of sponge, without the pudding getting drowned in it.

The one and only problem I had with this dessert is warned on the packaging: when this thing comes out of the microwave it is hot. Really, really hot. So hot, in fact, that when I tipped mine out of its pot and onto a plate, and I was clumsy enough to let a finger get in the way, I ended up with quite a nasty burn on that finger.

Still, that won't dissuade me from eating the other one, or from buying this product again, or other, similar products, for that matter. While I might prefer the individual pots to be larger, these do make for a very quick and easy dessert that can be frozen, but which lasts pretty well in the fridge.

Baking Special - Halloween Surprise Cookies

OK, here's something a bit more interesting and challenging... Every so often, my boss bakes a round of what she calls 'Cardiac Cookies' (so called because the quantity of sugars involved in making them means they're liable to induce cardiac arrest if consumed to excess). Since starting this li'l ol' blog, I've been thinking about baking... I've got the makings of brownies, but in a box bought from a shop, so the next most interesting option was to attempt to bake my own Cardiac Cookies.

...Or my own version.

I considered what could be used in place of the Snickers chunks used in the original recipe, and ended up with After Eight mints... after all, how often do you get mint choc cookies? So... here we jolly well go...

Apologies for the use of American cup sizes for measurements... The recipe is technically American, but I shall endeavor to update with coherent UK measures once I have them figured out. Please note that these measures do not equate to a teacup... though I'd imagine that, as long as the proportions remain the same, you'd just end up with loads more cookie dough if you used teacups.

Ingredients

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup softened butter
• 1/2 cup Golden Syrup
• 2 eggs
• 3 cups flour (preferably self-raising, or add a tablespoon each of baking powder and baking soda if using plain)
• 1 box After Eight mints

Preparation Time: About 20 minutes for the dough, then about 10-15 minutes per batch to bake

Tools Required:

• Large mixing bowl
• Measuring cups
• Bowl or jug for beating the eggs
• Fork or whisk for beating the eggs
• Spoon or somesuch stirring implement for mixing the dough (but see personal note below)
• Baking tray
• Foil
• Oven for baking cookies
• Rack for cooling cookies
• Microwave for softening butter (or patience, if waiting for it to happen naturally)

Process:
To begin with, soften the butter by chopping it up into manageable chunks, placing in the measuring cup, and sticking the whole thing in the microwave on the lowest setting for about 30 seconds. Mix together the two kinds of sugar, butter and golden syrup. Beat the eggs then add them to the bowl and mix thoroughly. Add in the flour and mix some more, until you're dealing with a sticky mass of sugary, cookie dough goodness. Due to the way I measured out my ingredients, I got this bit hopelessly wrong, and consequently had a very hard time mixing it all up. My bowl received three cups of self-raising flour first, followed by the sugars, butter and syrup. I may have given myself RSI trying to beat that stuff into submission so, once I'd added the eggs and mixed them in to a certain degree, I cast aside my spoon and got to mixing the old-fashioned way.

Meaning 'By Hand'.

Oh yes, I did.

This automatically makes my cookies sexier, not to mention more sensual and intimate... Or something. Certainly more personal than carrying on with the spoon and, frankly, more comfortable.

And, yes, I washed my damned hands. Several times, in fact. Messy work, making cookies, and I can get a little obsessive about keeping my hands clean when dealing with food.

Anyway, once the dough was ready, it was placed in the fridge for a while, just to give me a bit of a rest. Cooling the dough does make it easier to handle, also. It is very, very sticky, and will end up sticking to your hands better than the fillin' once it's warmed up. Theoretically, this fridge time was also when I should have made myself some dinner.

Ahem.

Once the dough is cooled, yank it back out of the fridge, and grab a heaped tablespoonful. Grab an After Eight mint, pretending it's nowhere near 8pm so you're not obliged to eat it, and wrap the dough around it. Try to ensure it's all even and nicely sealed. My first round of cookies used rather too much dough, and ended up swelling to virtually fill the baking tray. These things expand a hell of a lot in the oven, so be sparing. There should be sufficient dough should make about 20-30 cookies in total.

Lay out on foil on the baking tray (this makes extracting the baked cookies far easier) and bake in an oven pre-heated to 200C (350F) for 10-15 minutes (closer to the low end, if using a fan-assisted oven like mine). The cookies should be golden brown when done. Transfer the foil sheet to a rack, allow the cookies to cool for a couple of minutes, then remove them from the foil to allow them to cool more fully without going sweaty. As long as they're not overdone, they should remain reasonably soft.

Once the baking is complete, scoff any remaining After Eight mints. Go on, you deserve them.

The Results:
Y'know, I have to say I'm pretty happy with the way these turned out. As mentioned, the first batch turned out pretty massive... four of them almost becoming one megacookie... but, other than that, they were probably the most successful. Subsequent batches suffered slightly (none burnt, but they were more than 'golden' brown) through mistiming and leakages where the corners of the mints protruded from the dough. The original recipe suggests 12-18 minutes baking time, which must be for ovens that are not fan-assisted (or possibly the Snickers bar, and the addition of Peanut Butter, change the composition of the dough to the extent that it takes longer to bake), so I had to dial back the time for each batch. Even ten minutes turned out to be a bit too long once I'd got the correct amount of dough per cookie.

I must further confess that the later batches suffered from a loss of attention as my inherent laziness kicked in. Making up the cookies to be baked is a very fiddly process, made worse by the stickiness of the dough as it warms in the hand. Possibly rolling it out might have been a better idea, but I don't have a rolling pin, and I didn't have space to do the rolling anyway. I ended up washing my hands a lot.

I ended up with about 28, 8 of which were the oversized initial batch, and two of those were used for sampling purposes (the first one was pretty good... but I just needed to be sure, darn it!). The remaining six oversized cookies will be given to my sister tomorrow, and the 20 'normal' sized cookies will accompany me to the office. Not enough for a full house but, being Friday, I don't expect there to be a full house.

Terry's Chocolate Orange - Volcanic Popping Candy version

Look, it's called 'snacks & the single man'. It's inevitable that chocolate would come into it sooner or later.

I'm not quite sure why I've avoided Terry's Chocolate Orange. It's not that I dislike chocolate, or orange-flavoured chocolate, or orange-shaped, orange-flavoured chocolate, either in theory or in actuality. Maybe I tried one when I was younger, and it didn't light my candle..?

These days I'm clearly not so fussy about my chocolate delivery systems.

The standard version is perhaps a little too sweet for milk chocolate so, if Terry's were to make a dark chocolate orange, I'd be all over that like... well, like the remnants of chocolate on my fingers from the last one. Or, most likely, more so.

I was given the mint chocolate variety by a friend, and I found that very moreish. It really was a struggle not to finish it in one sitting, despite it being still quite rich... the milk chocolate again somewhat spoiling the otherwise pleasant flavour... Though whoever thought of making a mint-flavoured chocolate orange was clearly in need of some quiet time in a padded room. It's just not right, OK?

So when I saw this thing in all it's orange and purple Halloween/Bonfire Night glory, I could not help but try one. I quite like the concept... but does the execution live up to the promise of 'volcanic' popping candy?

The short answer is 'no'.

The popping candy is barely discernable, causing only the mildest of crackling at the back of the tongue. The average serving of fizzy drink is comparatively more 'volcanic' than this stuff, even without having been shaken. What little popping candy there is does add to the sweetness, though, making the end result almost unbearably sugary except when eaten straight from the fridge.

Rather disappointing... and probably best not given either to diabetics or hyperactive children on Halloween.