Today I made some peanut butter cookies. You take 260g of peanut butter, mix with 200g of caster sugar and an egg, form into small balls and bake at 180C for eight minutes. I was underwhelmed. Besides, it is also an awful lot of fat and sugar.
Costing, using Tesco and their cheapest, it would cost around 25p for the castor sugar, 8p for the cheapest egg (but probably not kind production methods), and 99p for the peanut butter. So £1.36 for about two dozen very small biscuits that were underwhelming. I suppose I could reduce the sugar, but I suspect that would have a big impact on the texture of the biscuit.
I can buy a pack of value chocolate chip cookies for 40p which are apparently more adequate. I would maybe need to buy two packets to get the same number of mouthfuls, but even so, it is depressing.
DH kindly bought me a hand mixer, which cost £10. That seems like a lot of money at the moment, so I need to be using it. I can cream a butter and sugar mix okay, and I can whip egg whites without worrying about the overbeating that can happen with a mixer, but the North American recipes that state you need to beat something hard for several minutes need a mixer.
I am going to go away and read Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's book on cooking with fruit. I don't mind making stuff that is a little bit more expensive as long as it is healthier. I don't think those peanut butter cookies would do it.
This works well with a hand held mixer:- 6 ounces of Stork margarine, 6 ounces of self raising flour, 6 ounces of caster sugar, 3 eggs, half teaspoon of baking powder and a teaspoon of vanilla essence. Put all the ingredients in a bowl and with the mixer turned of lightly stir all the ingredients together, the idea is to break the eggs and combine most of the flour, this way you don't have clouds of flour flying around the kitchen. Turn the mixer on and whizz everything together for about a minute, don't get too hung up on *light and fluffy*. Everything needs to be combined so you might need to stop the mixer and use a spatula to bring the flour at the bottom of the bowl into the mixture, when you have finished the mixture will be lighter in cloud due to the air you have incorporated. This is the best and easiest sponge recipe ever, forget all that creaming the butter and sugar and then beating the eggs in malarkey....this never fails and is easy to increase or decrease the quantity just remember two ounces of flour, sugar and marg for every egg, unless you get into really large quantities the baking powder and vanilla stay the same. Swap a tablespoon or two of flour for cocoa (never hot chocolate...to sweet) for chocolate cake. Either bake in two lined sandwich tins, cool and fill with jam for a Victoria Sponge or use paper cases in a bun tin for Bear and friends sized snacks......go mad put a few currants or chocolate chips in the mix. Oven temperature needs to be about 180 degrees and bake for around 20 minutes, all ovens vary so just keep you eye on them. This is a very child friendly recipe, I used to work in pre schools and have made these with the children.
ReplyDelete