It’s a double header this week! It was my turn to bake some goodies to raise money for charity at work a few weeks ago. As I’d just spent a couple of evenings concentrating on my diamond jubilee cake, I decided to make something quick, easy and utterly delicious – these chocolate orange and pecan cookies.
I’ve made these a fair few times now, and they always turn out brilliantly. The huge chunks of orange-flavoured chocolate and the generous pieces of pecan work fantastically together, but I’ve also used other combinations, including white chocolate and hazelnut and milk chocolate (Milka chocolate, specifically!) and hazelnut. Walnuts would also work well in this recipe.
The method itself is very straightforward – chuck everything in a bowl, mix and then bake. I managed to place my cookie dough balls a little too close together, resulting in one giant cookie (see above). Not really a bad thing if you’re going to eat them all yourself anyway, but I had to carefully slice them up on this occasion!
Earlier this week, I made another BBC Good Food favourite – triple chocolate chunk muffins. As you might expect, they contain milk, white and dark chocolate – as well as some cocoa powder! The chocolate hit is incredibly intense, which is perfect for a chocoholic like myself.
Again, the recipe is very simple. It uses a little butter, but gets most of the fat from a tub of soured cream – which makes for a beautifully soft texture. I absolutely love the massive chunks of chocolate in these muffins, so much so that I generally don’t bother to snap the bars into neat little pieces, preferring to break them roughly so some bits are rather larger than the others! I also put in a little more chocolate than the recipe says (I see little point in measuring 85g of chocolate when I buy them in 100g bars) and make 12 instead of 11 muffins.
The muffins are best eaten while they’re still gooey and warm. No need to eat them all straight from the oven (although I probably could!); you can put cooled muffins in the microwave for a few seconds to get the same effect.
I tried one of the muffins myself; the others went to my family and also to my boyfriend to take with him on a boozy canal boat holiday. Here’s hoping the crew manage to eat them without dropping them in the canal first…
The recipes
Both from BBC Good Food 1o1 Cakes & Bakes. The muffin recipe can also be found online here.