Recipe:

1 2/3 cup self-rising flour
1 pinch baking powder
1 egg, slightly beaten
2/3 cup sugar
1 stick butter
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 cup choc chips/broken choc bar
1 cup crushed nuts (of any kind!)

1. Mix dry ingredients, and rub in butter
2. Put in the egg and vanilla essence
3. Fold in the chips and nuts.
4. Bake for 8-10mins in a preheated oven at 350F until just set. Let it cool before eating.



Packaging:

Cut paper into a flower shape (a square iwth semicircles on each side): an outer sheet that can be anything, and an inner lining of wax paper/parchment paper.
Cut out two strips of plastic (cellophane, whatever). The width of the plastic is the width of the square of the paper base.
Place two cookies in square. Fold up sides.
Position the rectangular strips of plastic in a X shape, put the paper package where they intersect.
Draw up the plastic sides, and use a string/ribbon to tie the plastic together.

Give them away to as many people as you can find!!

school is making me right pissy. studying is driving me crazy, and just about the only thing that i constantly crave to do is baking. which isn't unusual since it's something i enjoy, but it's a little terrifying how intense the feeling is some times.

here's a simple blueberry crumble i made because i loved how it looked on smittenkitchen. as you all well know, this is my favorite website. i go on there just to be inspired (probably why i get such strong baking cravings as well, come to think of it). blueberries weren't that cheap, but i can live with it. i have to say the bubbling purple of the blueberries peeking through the crumble was really nice.


instead of the 9x13 pan recommended, i halved the recipe and made it in a 7" square cake pan, as you can see. i used the zest of a whole lemon just because i love the smell of it, and added lemon to taste to the blueberries. i have a thing for sour tastes, within reason, of course. i also modified the crumble a little, just for a bit more fragrance, by adding good vanilla extract. by good i mean the recent bottle i got which has got lots of tiny little aromatic seeds in. i feel lots happier using that in my baked goods, especially if you can see it. MIGHT try a plain vanilla pount cake next time, just to set those seeds off prettily.

here's a peek at the inside of the crumble. the layers came out very nice, but this is a picture of the first one i took out though the layers aren't as well-defined in this one. it tastes beautiful, fresh and not too sweet. i include the ingredients i used below to make this pan of crumble. techniques are the same as you would use for any crumble, so im not going into that.

0.5 cup white sugar
0.5 teaspoon baking powder
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
0.5 cup cold butter
0.5egg (i whisked up one egg in a seperate bowl, and added half to the dry mixture with the butter)
Pinch of salt
Zest of one lemon

2 cups fresh blueberries
0.25 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
Juice of half lemon

just as a treat, look at what came in for me through the post today! im waiting to make a cake for my friend's birthday that will leave me with 8 brilliant egg yolks. creme brulee, anyone?

Thanks to wonderful, wonderful friends out there, I had the opportunity to test out naan bread using my new baking stone! Blasting the oven at 550F for over an hour allowed the stone to really heat up things, and the flat dough blistered beautifully within minutes.

I love naan! Or rather, it seems like I ended up with pita bread, having used rice milk rather than yogurt. I used virgin olive oil to flavor the bread.

It was served with a delicious chicken curry that was made by a far better chef than me... and I also used it to make dessert by spreading sliced bananas and pouring freshly made caramel all over them.

I prefer the whole wheat version, because you can really taste the nutty, whole grain flavor of the bread. The white wheat version handled really well, and it was so easy to spread the dough balls out into 12 inch diameter circles that I think I can use this recipe to try making roti prata.


Also, I spent some time at Borders today, engrossed by this book and its many, many pretty pictures. It really makes you think that you should learn everything their way instead of the usual trial-and-error method, but I found that a lot of the sample recipes were waaay too huge. It might be convenient in the future since we'll probably be cooking for 7-8+ people in our apartment, but I really think the price tag is a bit much. I think I'll spend my weekend in NYC holed away in Borders, making lots of notes on knife skills and the proper way to boil eggs...

:) Plus, bonus update on the basil and other plants growing at my window!