Apple and Maple Cookies

This recipe originates from one in the Great British Bake off cookbook (sticky maple and apple tray bake). It is absolutely divine! Recently I was looking at that recipe thinking,
"hmmmm should I make this again?" but then I saw a recipe for cookies in the latest Good Food magazine and that made me think again. I really wanted cookies... So I use the maple and apple flavours with the cookie recipe.

The cookies themselves just have apples in them and it is the icing which is used to stick them together that gives them the maple flavour, much like the tray bake where the icing is the only maple flavoured component.

Before I made them I was a little worried about whether or not apples would actually work in cookies and I can confirm that they do! But first you must cube your peeled and cored apples then sauté them in butter and brown sugar. This gives them a lovely butterscotch-y coating and cookies them through a little, taking away the bite that raw apples have. This means that when your cookies are finished the apples are delicious and soft just adding little sprinkles of extra flavour and texture throughout the cookie.

My only complaint would be that the icing needs to go in the fridge if you are keeping them, but generally I would say try and eat them all on the same day as baking. What am I saying!? "Try and eat them on the same day" I'm sure you'll have no issues!

Hope your all having a nice week? On the plus side its half way to the weekend! *Woop woop*

Much Love
Alex-Rose xxx

Swirled Cookie Pops!

         

Well, I hope you're all coping with the end of the holidays! I am most definitely missing them... 7 AM is just way too early for waking up!

But on a more positive note, I don't know about you but we are having some gorgeous weather at the moment. Bring on the sunshine, shorts, Holidays, and dresses! Or maybe not dresses as it's been mad windy round here recently.

It's weird to think that only a few weeks ago some places were buried under drifts of snow?!

Anyway, back on track, the bake. These were my fist ever try at cookie pops, and like any first attempt it had its fair share of mishaps... The major issue being that on my first "tester" tray of cookie pops I put them in the oven with their PLASTIC sticks inserted... Clever move on my part I know, so yeah as you  can Imagine it didn't take long before I realised that the sticks probably shouldn't look glossy and wet and be wilting in the oven... So I took them out and scrapped that tray. So disaster averted I decided to put the cookies in the oven with a hole already inserted in them, but no stick, and bake them before putting the stick in once they were cool. I glued them in place with melted chocolate. This was until  came across some wooden lollipop sticks and decided to try those out as well, for anyone who is interested I can assure you that the best thing to use for cookie pops are most certainly using wooden lollipop sticks. Bake them with the wooden sticks already inserted, Not plastic ones... That said in the pictures mine have the plastic sticks as most f them were done that way. But aside from that minor disaster all went fine and the results were delicious! 

The recipe was an adaptation of one in the book Make Me Cake and Cookie Pops and I will be trying other recipes from this book for sure as there is some very cute ideas. Also, expect to see a lot more "Pops", of all varieties, as I now have a few different Pop books and am planning to do a review of them all at some point in the future.

Only two more full days until the weekend!

Much Love Alex-Rose xxx

Milk Chocolate and Hazelnut Cookies

Well, sorry for being so unfaithful to you blog land but other things were on my mind and I was just totally stumped for ideas, but here I am back and fresh with ideas!

So today I decided to bake some cookies, using the recipe from Claudia Winkleman's Great Comic Relief Bake-off cookies. The only problem being that I didn't have all the chocolate that was required (what is my life coming to)! So had to substitute 450g of dark chocolate for that of Cadburys Whole Nut a decision that I actually am semi glad of as it did make the cookies a bit different but I don't think Milk chocolate works all that well in them as it isn't strong enough. But, my worst troubles were still to come... After following all the steps using the right amount of everything I began spooning the mixture onto my prepared trays, it did cross my mind that the mixture was very runny (just like brownie mix to be more precise?!) this not only meant that it was hard to make the cookies the same size but also when I was cooking them they didn't need anywhere near the time suggested so they stuck to the tray! Something was wrong... before lobbing in more flour I checked the episode on you-tube and sure enough Claudia's cookies looked nothing like my odd runny wafer thin biscuits. The first (tester tray) was binned and I decided to edit the mix, I added a shed load of flour (no joke, loads was needed) and then spooned heaps of the new mix onto a couple of trays and they went into the oven. The new thicker mixture seriously improved the cookies, they rose up and turned into beautiful (rather big) golden cookies, I left them to cool then dipped them half into melted milk chocolate; they are delicious! So, what started out as a terrible failure turned out to be a great success  xx

Much love Alex-Rose xxx

Ps. Anyone got any ideas as to why mine (before changing them) were so runny and unlike hers!? Could it have anything to do with the change in chocolate as that was the only thing that I change, seems unlikely, but I can't think of anything else? xx